by Mark Evanier
Thereafter, Fox breezes in around eleven to begin berating his staff. But each morning before he arrives, the one-time Boy Scout and other artists take turns imitating their employer, pacing between the drawing tables repeating, “I’m King of the Comics!” Forever after, Kurtzberg and Bill Everett would greet each other with that impression.
CUT TO:
It’s the mid-sixties. Call it 1965. The Marvel Comics Group is publishing The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The X-Men, among others. Jacob Kurtzberg has long since become Jack Kirby, the preeminent artist of action-adventure comic books. At the moment, he’s Marvel’s star illustrator and co-creator of a new Renaissance for the comic book business. He’s also the instrument of change for yet another catchpenny publisher who’s becoming wealthy. In this case, the firm is well on its way to becoming a multibillion dollar empire and a fixture of American popular fiction.
The shops long behind him, Kirby works at home and comes into New York City once a week to drop off pages at the Marvel offices. Less often, if he can manage it . . . because when he’s on the train he’s not drawing, and that’s what Kirby is still all about: providing for his family. He wants to do great stories and express himself and share his incredible imagination with the world, and all that is fine. But being a good provider is still Job One for him and always will be.
On one office visit he runs into Everett and they exchange Victor Fox impressions, a quarter century after the fact. They’re just discussing where to go for lunch when Editor in Chief Stan Lee walks up and shows Jack a new Bullpen Bulletins house ad. “I’m gonna give you a real buildup, Jack,” Stan says. “See here? I’m calling you the King of the Comics!”
Kirby and Everett fall over laughing. “No, no,” Jack protests. “Make Bill Everett King of the Comics!”
Everett will have none of it. “Jack is definitely King of Comics,” he argues. Lee sides with Everett, so Kirby is stuck forever with the nickname. For a long time this truly modest man is embarrassed by it. Eventually, so many are calling him “King” that he comes to accept it. Who knows? Maybe a little promotional gimmick will translate into higher take-home pay.
It is, of course, the perfect title for a book about Kirby, but Jack would have wanted everyone to know it was meant with a twinkle. Everything else about him was vested with power and planet-rocking explosions and cosmic energy and changing the world around him, leaving nothing the way he found it.
But the nickname? The nickname was only meant by Jack or accepted when it came with a twinkle. Always with a twinkle.
Marvel Bullpen Bulletins
Writer: Stan Lee
April 1967
Marvel Comics
Credits
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 64
July 1967
Marvel Comics
Self-portrait
FOREVER PEOPLE
no. 4
August 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
DC Comics
ONE
IN THE STREETS
“Super heroes have a way of arriving just when they’re needed and so did Kirby. Every time the comic book industry needed someone to kick it in the butt or in a new direction, along came Jack. He was like the cavalry with a pencil.”
— WILL EISNER, COMICS CREATOR
THE FUTURE JACK KIRBY was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, the son of Benjamin and Rosemary Kurtzberg, who resided on Essex Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Another brother, David, followed two years later, by which time the Kurtzbergs had moved to a slightly larger (but still cramped) Suffolk Street tenement house.
Their parents had migrated from Austria some time around the turn of the century. “My father had insulted a member of German aristocracy,” Jack recalled. “The German, who was an expert marksman, challenged him to a duel. My father knew he’d be killed, so he decided to emigrate. All the relatives chipped in for the tickets.” Benjamin, a tailor by trade, obtained intermittent employment in New York garment factories, often getting up before dawn to walk to work.
Even putting in relentless hours, Ben Kurtzberg had trouble making ends meet. “From the time I was old enough to deliver papers,” Jack recalled, “I was aware that the income was necessary. It was that way in all the families in our neighborhood. Whatever you could bring home counted.
“But I was terrible at selling papers,” he continued. “You’d have to go to this building and pick up your papers from the back of a truck. I was the shortest guy and the other boys used to run right over me.” He fared slightly better with an array of messenger jobs and sign-painting chores, but as each ended, he was back with the newsboys, jostling to claim his bundle. It was a metaphor for his life ahead.
The money helped the Kurtzbergs buy groceries, and his parents would allow him a few nickels for his own entertainment and enlightenment. Enlightenment, mostly. Young Jakie, as most called him, avidly read pulps, eagerly followed (and copied) newspaper comics, and frequently spent all afternoon at the local cinema. As he later explained, “The pulps were my writing school. Movies and newspaper strips were my drawing school. I learned from everything. My heroes were the men who wrote the pulps and the men who made the movies. Every hero I’ve written or drawn since then has been an amalgam of what I believed them to be.
Above and following page
Childhood sketches
Art: Jack Kurtzberg (age 17)
1934
Childhood sketch
Art: Jack Kurtzberg (age 18)
December 28, 1937
“At times, I felt like I was being raised by Jack Warner. My mother would come and get me. She’d go to the doorman, and he knew which kid to drag out of the balcony. Even then, I’d plead with him, ‘Just let me see this next scene again.’ Those scenes still appear in my work.”
Jakie soon became a member of the Suffolk Street Gang. “Each street had its own gang of kids, and we’d fight all the time. We’d cross over the roofs and bombard the Norfolk Street Gang with bottles and rocks and mix it up with them.” Years later, in the Fantastic Four comic books, Ben “The Thing” Grimm—an obvious Kirby self-caricature—would fight a running battle with a mob called the Yancy Street Gang. The references to Jack’s childhood—and skirmishes with the gangs of his childhood—would be unmistakable.
Then there was the Boys Brotherhood Republic, one of many organizations of that era founded to put restless youths on the road to solid citizenry. Young Kurtzberg was already well onto that path but he signed up because, as he later put it, “It was a good place to make friends. In my neighborhood and with my height, I needed all the friends I could get.” Jakie and his new acquaintances launched the club’s mimeographed newsletter, The B.B.R. Reporter. It wasn’t much of a publication—the members had to practically beg family and neighbors to buy it—but it did feature the earliest published cartooning by the future Jack Kirby. (The staff photographer, Leon “Albie” Klinghoffer, became a lifelong Kirby friend . . . right up until 1985 when Palestinian terrorists hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and executed a wheelchair-bound American tourist. The world was outraged at the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, and Jack was more outraged than anyone over the loss of his friend.)
A meeting of the Boys Brotherhood
Republic. Jack Kurtzberg is at top right.
1935
STREET CODE
Above and following pages
STREET CODE
1983
Art: Jack Kirby
Lettering: Bill Spicer
All his life, Jack Kirby wrote and drew what others wanted. Sometimes, it was a matter of an employer choosing to put out westerns or war comics. At other times, it was Jack deciding some subject was what the readers wanted and would buy. Rarely though did Kirby have the luxury of following his personal muse. There were personal scenes and moments of autobiography, but they were generally confined to the subtext.
In 1983 a man named Richard Kyle decided to invert the process
. Kyle, one of the “founding fathers” of comic book fandom, was operating a bookshop in Long Beach, California. It had been one of the first in the nation to feature contemporary (as opposed to back issue) comic books prominently, and to import foreign efforts. Kirby, an occasional patron and in-store guest, heartily encouraged the business. That was where the industry was headed, he predicted.
Kyle was also dabbling in publishing, resurrecting the defunct pulp adventure title, Argosy. Having heard Jack speak for hours of his childhood, Kyle decided to commission a story—not a super-hero story or a war story or any particular genre. Just a story, based on any of Kirby’s many anecdotes. He also suggested something then unprecedented: printing from the pencil art without an inker coming between Jack and the audience. Kirby agreed and produced “Street Code,” a tale that instantly supplanted all that had come before as the personal favorite of both its creator and, especially, his wife Roz. She kept the double-page spread framed and on her wall where she could see it often, especially after Jack passed away.
His eyes were troubling him at the time. There would be little Jack Kirby art after, and sadly no opportunities to commit similar memoirs to paper and panels. Still, there was that one story . . . and though his Argosy didn’t last long on the newsstands, Kyle never regretted the investment. He—and we—will always have “Street Code” to show for it.
When he wasn’t reading or fighting, Jakie was drawing the visions he saw in his head. Many came from the newspaper strips he came to love and follow. And when he didn’t have paper, he’d draw on whatever was around: “I’d get the Daily News and the Journal,” he recalled. “Sometimes, we’d get them out of the neighbors’ trashcans, if they hadn’t been used to wrap fish. I’d read Barney Google and Jiggs and Maggie, and then I’d sit down and draw Barney Google and Jiggs and Maggie.” As major influences, he would later cite Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Hal Foster, along with editorial cartoonists like C. H. Sykes, “Ding” Darling, and Rollin Kirby. For a time, he really wanted to be Rollin Kirby but would ultimately settle for the surname.
“I’d doodle on the floor of the tenement. I’d stay there all day until the janitor came in and found me and beat the hell out of me.” His parents finally realized that the lad was not about to stop drawing and, though strapped for cash, they began buying him large pads of onionskin drawing paper. Jakie filled each tablet so rapidly that they began to ration them.
With parental approval, he dropped out of school, just shy of the twelfth grade. That was how critical it was to the family to have that weekly paycheck coming in. He would traipse around Manhattan with art samples, praying to land something that paid before his father ordered him to forget about drawing and apply at some factory.
By now, Jacob had become Jack. At least, everyone outside his immediate family was calling him that. He could feel himself changing in other, more meaningful ways. “I wanted to break out of the ghetto,” he recalled years later. “It gave me a fierce drive to get out of it. It made me so fearful that in an immature way, I fantasized a dream world more realistic than the reality around me.”
He may also have fantasized the tale of his one day at Pratt Institute, a story he told often in later years. Details changed with each telling, but essentially involved him landing a few minor illustration jobs—minor in both importance and salary. These jobs, he said, turned around his father’s attitude about there being money in drawing. It was arranged for Jack to enroll in the famed art school, but the very next day Ben Kurtzberg lost his latest tailoring job, and his son had to quit art school.
With or without a day of Pratt on his résumé, Jack continued searching for work. For a time, he and his father took on a pushcart concession, dragging a wobbly wagon to outlying areas of Manhattan to sell day-old baked goods. Jack decorated their “storefront” with hand-painted cartoons and, as he later explained, that paid off: “The other vendors saw them and asked if I’d paint signs for them, which I did. I made more money painting signs than hauling the pushcart around, but either way it wasn’t much.”
Finally, he found work drawing. Well, not exactly drawing, but it was near people who did.
In the spring of 1935, Jack answered a newspaper ad for artists. It led him to the heart of New York’s Times Square and the Max Fleischer animation studio, producers of the Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. There, Jack started at the bottom-feeding job in the house—opaquing cels. It paid poorly, the work was uncreative, and Jack didn’t get along with his bosses. “Too cocky, too eager to move up” was the rap on him. Cartoon studios expected you to starve for years while you learned your craft and advance to the good positions over time.
Young Kurtzberg couldn’t wait. He insisted on auditioning over and over, practically every week, for the next rung up . . . and in record time, he did advance to clean-up work. Then it was on to assistant animating, another position that didn’t pay well and involved little creativity. In animation, you drew what you were told, copying other artists’ drawings and working in other artists’ styles on stories and characters you didn’t create. The whole oppressive factory atmosphere further convinced him he might be fighting his way up the wrong ladder.
The Max Fleischer Studio, located at 1600 Broadway near Times Square in New York. Kirby later called it, “A great place to get out of.”
One of young Kurtzberg’s try-out drawings for an assistant animation job on Fleischer’s Popeye cartoons. The first cartoon he worked on in that capacity appears to have been “Clean Shaven Man,” which was released in February 1936.
The rumors solidified those feelings. Word was that the studio might go on strike . . . or to avoid a strike, the Fleischers might up and move the whole thing to Florida, a right-to-work state. The latter was what happened, but by that time Jack Kurtzberg had departed.
While making the rounds, he’d met a man named H. T. Elmo who operated the Lincoln Features Syndicate, an outfit that sounded more impressive than it was. Seeking escape from the Fleischers, Jack bombarded Elmo with samples and landed a position with a meager salary—less than what he’d made drawing Popeye—but with a scale of lucrative-sounding bonuses if his output boosted the syndicate’s receipts.
It was a job drawing comic panels for syndication, though just barely. Lincoln offered low-priced wares to papers that either could not afford the product of larger syndicates, or who operated in cities where larger papers had locked up all the popular strips. To this end, Elmo paid low fees and instructed his artists to replicate what the big boys were selling. Can’t get Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for your newspaper? Then why not try our Curious Customs and Oddities? Until Kurtzberg came along, what Elmo offered were pretty much the exact same features as the majors but without the quality.
To maintain consistency as artists came and went, and to make Lincoln seem more professional, each feature carried a permanent, spurious byline. “Brady” illustrated Our Puzzle Corner and “Lawrence” was responsible for Laughs from the Day’s News!, but neither artist existed. One feature—a panel of medical facts called Your Health Comes First—was signed “Jack Curtiss,” a name Kirby would use on several early projects, including many of the political cartoons he drew for Lincoln.
For Jack, it was a period of many firsts, chief among them the first time he saw his comic art receive professional reproduction. It was also the first of many instances where he’d look at his employer—at the only job he was then able to secure—say, “I’ve got to build this place into something,” and throw himself into the task.
It was his spin on the American Dream: You make your boss rich and he’ll take care of you. All Jack’s life he believed in that, no matter how many times the bosses got rich and he didn’t.
LAUGHS FROM THE DAY’S NEWS!
1936
Art: Jack Kirby
Lincoln Features Syndicate
Political cartoon
1939
Art: Jack Kirby
Lincoln Features Syndicate
Night and da
y he labored—a slave for Lincoln, producing more work than Elmo thought humanly possible. Most of the time, Jack wound up drawing at home in the Kurtzberg family flat, working on the kitchen table as his mother scurried around him, cooking and cleaning. Often, she’d be urging him to clear the table so she could set it for dinner, and he’d be pleading for another five minutes so he could finish one more panel. “It was even noisier there than at the Lincoln offices,” Jack recalled, “but at least at home there was someone to bring me soup.” The kitchen seat seems to have been a source of comfort to him. In later years, when he could easily have afforded a more conventional artist’s setup, he often opted for a straight-backed wooden chair, not unlike those from his mother’s kitchen.
Jack was so prolific that Elmo decided to try marketing several daily strips, all drawn by Kurtzberg in different styles and under different names. Jack Curtiss drew The Black Buccaneer, a swashbuckler strip. There was also “Cyclone” Burke by “Bob Brown.” That one was a cross between Smilin’ Jack and Buck Rogers. He even went back to drawing Popeye in a fashion . . . a knockoff by “Teddy” called Socko the Seadog.
Jack loved the diversity of the job as he vaulted from world to world, spending his mornings drawing pirates and his afternoons in outer space. He especially enjoyed doing political cartoons. As busy as he was, he always took out time to follow the news and to formulate strong, often prescient opinions. He was the first of his crowd to proclaim that a war against that Hitler fellow was in America’s future.