In short, Kirby was responsible for the birth of an epic dramatis personae the like of which has hardly been seen since the Bible or the ancient Greek and Norse myths upon which Marvel freely drew.
But though the characters are now etched upon the general public’s consciousness, not so the name of the man who conceived their look and, with his distinctive, bold, graphic style, was, in his own way, as much a titan of Pop Art as Andy Warhol.
The Thing goes into battling crying his catchphrase: "It's clobbering time!" (Marvel/Kirby Museum)[Missing Credit]
Earlier this month, more than three decades after the artist’s death in 1994, there was a belated attempt to redress the historic lack of adequate recognition for Kirby’s work.
Just a block away from his birthplace in New York City, a grand ceremony attended by family, dignitaries and fans in the costumes of their beloved Marvel characters marked the renaming of a street as Jack Kirby Way. Speeches celebrated his work and acknowledged the gesture was long overdue.
But what was the Jack Kirby way? The life of Jacob Kurtzberg – as he was born in tenement slums of the city in 1917 – was driven by conflict: first, against the Irish-American gangs of his childhood who sought out the “Christ-killer” Jews of the Lower East Side in bloody pitched battles.
Then, against the Nazis he fought with US forces in Europe in the Second World War, risking his life repeatedly as a scout in enemy territory at the spearhead of General Patton’s remorseless push for victory.
And, over and over again, against the shysters that sought to rob the towering giant of comic books of the royalties and – worst of all – the artistic credit for his work.
The lucrative superhero blockbuster industry is now light years distant from the milieu in which Kirby and the other founding figures of the comic books – many of them Jewish – forged their legacy.
For much of the last century, comic book artistry was an impecunious, hardscrabble existence not so very different from the sweatshops of the Delancey Street garment trade in which Kirby’s Austrian immigrant father had eked out a brutally hard existence.
The only differences were what came out off the production lines: schmatte garments for the father, pulp pages for the son.
Kirby stands apart from so many of the other comic book artists of his day, for whom strength was a fantasy to be projected onto their creations. (When, in 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster conjured up Superman, they were devising the living embodiment of Jewish wish fulfilment to straighten out the increasingly troubled world of the pre-war era, and even gave their hero from the planet Krypton an alien name that is essentially Hebrew: Kal-El.)
Kirby was no nebbish, more a real-world counterpart to The Thing: squarely built if diminutive, quick to anger and more than capable of handling himself in a street fight.
He was a tough Jew.
Sometimes the battles blurred the line between reality and artistry: witness the moment Kirby’s creation Captain America punched Adolf Hitler square in the jaw, in a comic book cover in March 1941, nine months before the US entered the war in Europe that the artist would join in person eventually.
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Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941). Cover art by Joe Simon (inks and pencils) and Jack Kirby (pencils). (Image: Marvel Comics/Wikimedia)[Missing Credit]
Who, back then, could have guessed that any of the comic book creations would be remembered a week on, let alone immortalised the best part of a century later?
Yet as the original readers of the Marvel comics of the 60s grew up and were followed by new generations of fans, what was once dismissed as kids’ stuff gradually shifted to claim centre stage in the cultural zeitgeist, especially after Wall Street and then Hollywood came calling.
Here, in what should have a triumphant chapter for the man comic cognoscenti knew as “King of Comics”, came the cruellest twist. Wider public recognition came in abundance – but for Stan Lee, the motormouthed self-promoting Marvel writer and editor.
He happily told the world the tale of his genius and, by general account, freely took credit for the work of others, most of all that of Kirby, who bitterly complained that he had not only drawn the foundational works of Marvel but also largely devised the storylines to which Lee added little more than dialogue and general, vague outlines.
With his distinctive moustache, laughable toupee and permanently present cigar, Lee – himself Jewish, nee Stanley Lieber – was first absorbed into the hippy counterculture as a college speaker and soon became a universally recognised media face.
Fame, and riches, were his, not Kirby’s, for whom clobbering time against lawyers, money men and his own demons consumed much of the final chapter of his life, as he sought financial redress and a correction of the history books.
There is a postscript. A few years after his death, The Thing – also known as Ben Grimm – was recognised as being Jewish in a 2002 edition of the Fantastic Four and given a barmitzvah. Fans were delighted. They knew who this was really about.
It gets better. A couple of years later, in a particularly cosmic adventure, the Fantastic Four found themselves meeting God. The divine presence turns out to be an elderly, white-haired man with intense, lean, features, sitting at a desk, pencil in hand over a draughtsman’s board.
The face is unmistakable: the immortal Jack Kirby.
