Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Jack Kirby’s birth. If you’ve never heard of him – and many haven’t then, you can head over to the link below to read what is a very good bio of the unknown king of comics.
https://newrepublic.com/article/144558/jack-kirby-unknown-king
Jack Kirby, working with Stan Lee, co-created and developed most of the Marvel Comics universe in the 1960s. At a time when Marvel published 8 comics a month, Kirby was usually drawing and plotting at least four of them. That’s about 100 pages a month. Thor, Captain America, The Avengers, the X-Men, Hulk, Fantastic Four were all Kirby co-creations, along with their attendant villains such as Dr Doom, Loki, Magneto and Galactus. Hell, he even created Bingo’s avatar.
And of course he never owned any of them. The bitter irony of his life is that, while working at a incredible pace (he was a Depression era kid), he developed characters that changed the industry, fired the imagination of so many and ended up filling today’s multiplexes. And all the while, he was working under a work for hire contract that assigned ownership of the characters to his publishers.
I believe that a new version of Jack Kirby, King of Comics out at the moment. Well worth a look.
Way ahead of his time – it’s taken until the last year or so for the movies to catch up and actually put something close to his vision on-screen with Doctor Strange, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 and the forthcoming Thor: Ragnarok (going by the trailer) all being massively in debt to some of that (frankly bonkers) imagery…
Must dig out my “Kirby Five-Oh!” book for a browse, thanks for the nudge…
Well ahead of his time. Apparently, when Marvel sold their comics business for hee haw in the 70s, Kirby commented “Ant Man is worth more than that”. People thought it was a crazy comment but look how he has been vindicated.
I read Sean Howe’s “Marvel Comics – the Untold Story” a couple of years ago. From the 60s to the mid 80s, it’s about writers, artists and comics. From the mid 80s onward it’s about intellectual property struggles.
In fairness, that’s partly because the company massively bilked those great 60s/70s writers and artists.
Which led to the writers and artists which came after them being very wary of creating new characters in Marvel stories. Even as early as the 70s folk like Roy Thomas would choose to write Conan rather than give Marvel new characters, as he knew he wouldn’t own them.
This has led to Marvel using the same old characters in their stories. Despite calling themselves the House of Ideas, how many Marvel characters can most people name who were created after the 60s? Wolverine, The Punisher and Deadpool maybe.
By far the greatest comic book artist ever. Because he had a unique style that seemed born out of comic books – there are dozens of finer artists working in comics, artists who came from a more academic background, who could actually “paint” – but Kirby, with his instantly recognisable style, could bring a page to life like no other. I used to gaze at his work for hours back in the late sixties, and a Kirby spread still means more to me than most National Gallery walls.
He even looked like his creations:
http://i.imgur.com/AkHsRww.jpg
(Kickstarter campaign, The Life and Times of Jack Kirby)
He was a great artist, but of all time? Ehhh, mebbe not. I’m putting Joe Colquhoun up.
What he did have was a clearly articulated view of his worlds (New Gods) and the ability to express them in ways that writers collaborating with artists can’t.
All hail the King.
I used to get cross about the way he (and others) had been plagiarised by Lichtenstein without credit. Now that looks like small beans compared to what he could and should have made from Hollywood.
Stan Lee may have had amazing stories but without Kirby’s extraordinary visual imagination, they would have fallen very flat. Lee has always been very good at publicising himself: I suspect he is now a minor league household name even for those who don’t read comics. A few more mentions of his partner would not come amiss.
Good on you Hawkfall for also reminding us about Jacob Kurzberg!
I didn’t hear about his self-promotional qualities when I was grabbing every Marvel comic I could afford off the racks, and neither (I imagine) did any other kid who instinctively knew they were in the presence of a master – who went goggle-eyed at those incredible creations. He made direct contact with us; this is for you. That’s a kind of genius. And it’s a shame his talent for self-promotion wasn’t great enough to get him the millions of bucks that went somewhere else.
I was very aware of Stan Lee in my childhood Marvel-reading years – that face with the shades and ever-present stogie and his various messages (“Excelsior!”), plus occasional appearances in the comics themselves saw to that, but his attitude in general (like fanclub FOOM – “Friends Of Ol’ Marvel”) was very much what set Marvel apart from their competitors, and maybe still does…
Obviously he’s getting on in years now, and has apparently shot at least 8 of his cameos in advance for forthcoming Marvel movies… a minor spoiler for Guardians Of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is that one of the post-credit “stings” shows Stan Lee to be one of The Watchers, with the implication that all of the Marvel stories (and his cameos in the Marvel movies) are actually the tales he is telling his fellow Watchers… nice!
And in the wake of Charlottesville, he recently posted this (https://twitter.com/TheRealStanLee/status/897504040208154627) on Twitter, yet another reason to like him…
Thing is KFD, Kirby was most likely responsible for the stories as well. I think the general consensus these days is that Kirby did the majority of the artwork and plotting with Lee’s contribution being the dialogue after everything else was done.
I’m not anti-Stan Lee. I think that Lee and Kirby needed each other. Lee brought the human touch to the stories. the Silver Surfer was Kirby, but Aunt May was Lee, and both characters are vital to their books.
I rather like that explanation of the relationship between the two of them, Hawk.
It was a stroke of luck, H.P,. that you misunderstood me about Kirby. Suddenly the memories came flashing back about the Soapbox, letters page and all those odd small ads. There was something very exotic about buying Marvel comics as they were always US imports and not adapted in anyway for the UK reader. There were always things I did not understand, but that was part of the charm.
I never thought about it at the time, but the Soapbox, in-jokes, wisecracks, gossip etc, definitely made me feel part of a community of Marvel readers.
That is certainly true.
But I remember that Stan always had Stan’s Soapbox where he would give his opinions, news etc. Which I liked. It made reading the comics that much more personal. He enjoyed being in the limelight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullpen_Bulletins
His cameos in the modern Marvel films are always worth looking out for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKY6fkOie8c
My apologies, K. I read your comment as saying Kirby had self-promotional skills. Stan Lee’s name was all over the comics, as you say, but Marvel wouldn’t have been Marvel without him – and it certainly set them apart from dull old DC back then, where you got no sense at all of the people who made the comics. But Kirby and Ditko were the first artist’s names I noted – Ditko because of Doctor Strange, mainly, where his style was appropriately weird. I can still remember some Kirby pages, not having seen them for decades, which is more than I can say for most artists’ work.
A gallery filled with blown-up Kirby pages would be something to see.
That Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention it, and I could be wrong, but I believe the Bullpen Bulletins and letters pages largely came about because in order to receive a special mailing rate, comic books had to feature at least two pages of text items. Some companies, like EC, DC or Harvey (that I know of) would have two-page text stories. Someone at Marvel must have realised the potential of building a a rapport with the reading audience – remember, comics were considered to be strictly kids’ stuff back then – and used the two pages to run a letters page and a page devoted to company activities.
Stan’s chatty (though hucksterish) style, combined with including letter writers’ addresses, went a long way to establishing a fandom that until then had been fairly loose and unorganised.
These days there are just as many “Stan wrote it all!” camps as there are “Jack wrote it all!” factions. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween. As writer and historian Mark Evanier noted in the last few days, a lot of it boils down to who or how you define “writing” when it comes to comics. Hmm…I may have gone off a on a tangent here.
None of which should distract from the fact that Jack Kirby was a monster talent, and a pretty well A-1 human being, from all accounts.
Here’s a good overview of Kirby’s work:
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Jack_Kirby
He wasn’t a Marvel Comics work slave at all – he always had his own companies, worked regularly for DC Comics as well, and also did a lot of work for “Classics Illustrated” and created a couple of love & romance comics.
His “New Gods” and “Forever People” stories for DC are just plain nonsense however and reading them today (they were just reissued as hardcover graphic novels in Germany) you wonder if they were all created on mushrooms or jazz cigarettes.
“New Gods” and “Forever People” were distressingly disappointing. I also had a 3D comic by him which meant nothing. (It’s in your wikia link – Captain 3D)
And yet DC have managed to keep mining those characters for the last 40-something years…
Ah – I haven’t read a comic book for nearly fifty, so I’m a little out of the loop!
I didn’t mean to say that he was a slave at Marvel – he had status and respect there. But he was still an employee, being paid by the page, who eventually left over a contractual dispute (He wasn’t alone in this – Flo Steinberg, who practically ran the office, left after she was denied a few bucks pay rise).
I genuinely think Jack Kirby is the most important and certainly the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Sadly the art world is far to snobby to give him the credit he deserves.
I mean have you seen the forbidden zone stuff he did in the Fantastic four. Where he zoomed in photocopied backgrounds to create a weird space effect. Warhol could only dream of creating pop art like that.
Warhol I actually rate. He was a proper draughtsman, for one thing, a fine commercial illustrator. When he changed his game (the clever, clever bastard) he did rather more than just pillage pop culture, he created some indelible imagery.
But yes – Kirby worked absolutely non-ironically, outside the world of contemporary art, and reached millions. Without making them, unlike Warhol.
See my comment upthread. I’m going to say Joe Colquhoun was better. Not as widely impactful, but better.
I did an image search for Joe Colquhoun … hmm. I think in the Greatest Artist Of All Time stakes, Turner just edges ahead. He would have done comics if he’d been born later. Like Shakespeare would have gone into advertising.
I asked my 14 year old if he knew who Stan Lee is.
Interesting answer:
“Of course I do. He’s the bloke who wrote all those classic Marvel comics along with that other guy ….can’t remember his name …but he went to work at D.C.”
So Jack K is on his radar after all.