Clobberin’ Time

In the heyday of comic books from 1930s through the ‘60s – what pop historians call comics’ golden and silver ages – fans might have been surprised to learn that many of their heroes and superheroes were Jewish. Superman, Batman, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four – all Jewish. Even Mighty Thor and the Asgardians were Jewish. Which is to say that most of their creators and publishers were Jewish, many of them immigrants’ children from the Lower East Side, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Like blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, comic books represented a low rung on the cultural ladder, within reach of immigrants’ kids. In comic books they not only found employment, haphazard and ill-paid as it often was, but lived out their fantasies and created whole fantasy universes for millions of readers. In doing so they played significant roles in creating American pop culture. Following the custom of the times, few of them signed their Jewish-sounding names to their work. They became Bob Kane or Stan Lee.

Jacob Kurtzberg is a good example. Born in 1917, he grew up in a tiny tenement flat on Suffolk Street near Delancey Street, the older of two sons of immigrant garment workers. The constant fighting with other kids’ street gangs, Jewish boys against Irish, Italian and black, grew him up feisty and defensive. It also left him with the intimate understanding of hand-to-hand combat that would show up in his brawny drawings. “I hated the place,” he would tell Comics Journal’s Gary Groth in 1990. “I wanted to get out of there!”

He escaped by walking up to the movies on 42nd Street and by reading newspaper comic strips. He said he found his first pulp magazine, Wonder Stories, floating in a gutter. He saw the drawing of a rocket ship on the cover and was hooked. Dreams of becoming a movie star or a gangster – both symbols of making it in America to a poor kid on the Lower East Side – gave way to art. Except for one week, he said, at the Pratt Institute (his parents couldn’t afford to have him stay, and he didn’t fit in anyway) he was self-taught. By 18 he was drawing editorial cartoons and comics for newspapers, signing them Jack Cortez, Jack Curtis, finally settling on Jack Kirby, which he made legal, to his parents’ dismay.

While still a teen he worked for a while in Max and Dave Fleischer’s animation studio, helping to draw Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. The factory-like production methods, with a long line of artists each drawing just a few cels, reminded him too much of his parents’ sweatshop piece-work, and he quit. 

His career took off with the rise of the comic book industry in the late 1930s. The startling success of Superman, who appeared in 1938, set off a mad scramble of competitors and imitators. Characters, titles and whole companies rose and fell at a phenomenal clip. Kirby worked for the legendary Will Eisner’s studio, where he met Bob Kahn (who, as Bob Kane, would create Batman). He met Joe Simon while working for the cigar-chewing publisher Victor Fox, practically a comic-book character himself, prone to excitable outbursts like “I’m the king of comics!”

Teaming up with the older Simon, Kirby worked for yet another legendary comics publisher, Martin Goodman of Timely Publications. They whipped up a small army of characters who failed to impress readers, despite wonderful names like Master Mind Excello, the Fin, Flexo the Rubber Man and the Phantom Bullet. Then in September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland. Jews in America watched with mounting alarm as Hitler’s armies devoured more and more of Europe in 1940. While Roosevelt kept the US out, Simon and Kirby took matters in their own hands and created Captain America. When the first issue of Captain America debuted at the end of 1940, with the hero socking Hitler on the jaw on the cover, it sold a million copies. It also drew death threats from the German American Bund, an organization of Nazi supporters with headquarters in Manhattan’s largely German enclave in Yorktown. Mayor La Guardia called Simon and Kirby and told them not to worry, the city of New York would protect them. Moonlighting for another publisher, Simon and Kirby also debuted the equally popular Captain Marvel.

One day the 17-year-old Stanley Lieber, a cousin of Goodman’s wife, showed up at the office. Lieber, a recent high school grad, had grown up in Washington Heights and the Bronx, an avid reader of comics and adventure stories and a budding writer. Gangly and hyperactive, he annoyed the older, hard-working Kirby. And there was class friction. Kirby, the poor kid from the street, resented the middle-class Lieber’s strolling into a job through family connections. Their relationship would remain fractious until Kirby’s death, and beyond. When Goodman let Stanley do some writing, he signed it Stan Lee. Simon and Kirby left Timely for better pay at National (later DC), home of Superman and Batman. With their defection, Goodman made the teenage Lee his editor.

With some money coming in Kirby moved off the Lower East Side to the Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, where he met and married the girl who remained his wife and staunch supporter until his death. She’d later joke that when they met he invited her up to his room “to see his etchings,” and she was surprised to find that he really did want to show her his art. Drafted as a foot soldier, Kirby got his chance to fight Nazis for real, landing at Normandy shortly after D-Day. He would be hospitalized with a severe case of trench foot and feared for a while he would lose his legs. Lee served stateside. It’s likely both enjoyed seeing so many of their fellow GIs devouring comic books, which outsold other publications ten to one on military posts during the war.

In the shell-shocked postwar years the audience for golden age superheroes dwindled. Kirby and Simon hooked up again and cranked out Western comics, romance comics, crime comics, monster comics, anything they hoped might find a market. The backlash against comic books in the early 1950s, when the Senate held hearings about comics’ contributing to juvenile delinquency, decimated the industry. Television also lured the audience away. Simon and Kirby scraped along in the mid-1950s with projects like a parody and satire series, From Here to Insanity, that imitated MAD (begun in 1952) with stories like “Walt Chisely’s 20,000 Lugs Under the Sea” and “Dial ’M’ for Mother.” Simon would later start another MAD imitation, Sick.

By Kirby’s 1957/'58 newspaper strip Sky Masters of the Space Force and the Fantastic Four-like DC comic Challengers of the Unknown you can see the idiosyncratic style for which comic fans revere him. Traces of his tough Lower East Side upbringing are clear in his muscular, masculine figures (even the pretty women tended to be strong-jawed and tough-looking, like comic-book Eve Ardens), the physical weight of his heavy lines, the dynamic energy and extreme forced perspectives that explode images off the page with an almost 3-D effect. His early love of movies is also evident in his cinematic storytelling, each panel very much like a film frame.

Goodman and Lee were struggling at what would become Marvel Comics when Kirby went back to work for them as a freelancer in the late 1950s. Kirby told Grothhe didn’t get along with the affable, garrulous Lee any better now than he had before. Yet they made a very productive and profitable team. As Ronin Ro describes in his book about Kirby and Lee Tales to Astonish, Lee proved to be an excellent front man and tireless promoter. Through the 1960s and beyond he built up the Marvel brand. Characters like Thor, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Silver Surfer and Spider-Man renovated comic books for a new generation. Marvel’s silver age superheroes were as unlike their golden age predecessors as their '60s fans were unlike their parents. They were querulous, thoughtful, crippled by self-doubt, often unwilling superheroes or even super-antiheroes, a good fit for the decade. Marvel lifted the genre from the lower rungs of pop culture to pop art that Ivy League kids discussed and other artists admired. In the early-'60s comic book paintings that made him famous, Roy Lichtenstein reproduced Kirby panels (although he seemed to prefer DC artists). According to Lee, one day his receptionist told him a “Frank Felony” was there to see him. It turned out to be Federico Fellini, making a fan’s pilgrimage.

As Marvel’s profits and Lee’s fame soared, Marvel artists like Kirby and Spider-Man’s Steve Ditko chafed at the way the company treated them. First, because he was a freelancer, paid a flat per-page rate, Kirby saw none of the bounty Marvel was reaping from the skyrocketing sales, lucrative merchandising and licensing deals that stemmed from his work. Marvel even owned the original art, which he would be dismayed to see being sold at comic book conventions. None of this was unusual for the industry. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Cleveland teens who’d created Superman for DC, got $130 for the rights. After they lost a lawsuit in the 1940s for a piece of the franchise’s enormous profits they were effectively blackballed from the industry. They’d lived in poverty for decades when a campaign by fans in the 1970s finally won them pensions and health benefits that lasted until their deaths in the 1990s.

It also galled Kirby and Ditko that Lee took most of the credit for stories and characters they played huge roles in creating. In Lee’s telling, he dreamed it up, they drew it. Kirby told Comics Journal that he conceived, wrote and drew his comics, working at his home studio on Long Island, then handed them over to Lee, who fiddled with his dialogue. (Kirby’s copy did need help. A visual storyteller, he had a street guy’s tendency to moida the English language.) It’s undeniable that the Fantastic Four bear a strong resemblance to Kirby’s earlier Challengers. And Jacob “Ben” Grimm, the Fantastic Four’s Thing, is practically a Kirby self-portrait, a tough Jew (not stated explicitly until a 2002 post-Kirby issue) from the Lower East Side’s “Yancy” Street who grew up poor and fighting in gangs, source of his signature line, “It’s clobberin’ time.” Ben was Kirby’s father’s name. The sci-fi-meets-mythology scope of the Thor series seems pure Kirby. Similarly, though Lee took credit for conceiving Spider-Man (actually an old idea recast), the series was largely Ditko’s work.

While Lee gave interviews and went on college lecture tours, Kirby kept his head down and grumbled, and Ditko was effectively a recluse. So public and press came to accept that virtually the entire Marvel oeuvre was the product of Lee’s singular genius, with the artists merely executing his vision. Questions of who should get credit for what would be argued endlessly at comic book conventions – and eventually in court.

By the start of the 1970s Ditko and Kirby had both abandoned Marvel for more secure and better-paying jobs at DC. Through the 1960s Superman’s publisher had rested on its golden age laurels while Marvel changed the face of comics, and now it tried to catch up by buying some of its rival’s hip cachet. But DC wasn’t a good fit for Kirby, and his work there failed to sell as expected. Comic book sales in general were declining. Sales would streak to unimaginable new highs in the late '80s era of Watchmen and The Dark Knight, but for now the explosive growth of the silver age was over. DC and Marvel both looked increasingly to tv and film spinoffs for salvation.

Kirby returned to Marvel in the mid-1970s. (Ditko would do the same later.) It didn’t work out. To the fresh young faces on the staff he was a dinosaur, honored for his classic work but cranky, unhip and out of step. It didn’t help that Lee’s public image as Marvel’s sole resident genius was by now gospel. Kirby left again. He went back to animation, working on tv cartoons like Thundarr, Space Ghost and Scooby-Doo. A long and acrimonious campaign by fans and fellow artists in the 1980s shamed Marvel into giving Kirby back some of his original artwork. By the end of it his always thorny relationship with Stan Lee was at rock bottom.

Kirby also drew concept art for sci-fi films. It was Kirby’s artwork for a never produced sci-fi movie that CIA agent Tony Mendez took with him to Tehran as part of the cover story he used to slip American hostages out of Iran. Michael Parks plays Kirby in Argo. (The unproduced movie was an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, a novel close at heart to Kirby’s mix of sci-fi and mythology. Zelazny’s and Kirby’s influences are detectable in all sorts of sci-fi movies and tv shows, from Star Wars to the Stargate franchise.)

After a few years of failing health, Kirby died of a heart attack in 1994. He was 76. In his last years a new craze for everything comic book had lofted him to godlike status among fans, one of the founding fathers. He saw a new generation of artists analyzing and imitating his style, but he didn’t get to see his (or Lee’s, or his-and-Lee’s) characters enjoy their renaissance as live-action movie figures in the 2000s. In 2011 Kirby’s heirs lost a lawsuit against Marvel and its Hollywood partners for ownership of some of those characters. The court ruled that since everything Kirby had done at Marvel was work for hire, his estate had no claim on it.

By John Strausbaugh