Comic books' Jack Kirby speaks out on his life and art

January 02, 2003|BY ROBERT K. ELDER.

Artist and author Jack Kirby co-created some of the most memorable superheroes still battling it out today, among them the X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and The Incredible Hulk. Although one of the founding forces at Marvel Comics, Kirby often stood in the shadow of writer Stan Lee (currently suing Marvel over royalties from the mega-hit "Spider-Man" movie) and he struggled for recognition, respect and financial compensation.

It's somehow fitting then that Fantagraphic Books chose to profile this ground-breaking artist for their first installment of "The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby" (Fantagraphics, 120 pages, $18.95), a continuing series of critical biography books. Below is an excerpt from the book of an interview conducted by Gary Groth in 1989, five years before Kirby's death.

This question follows an account of Kirby's street fighting childhood in the poorest part of New York City's Lower East Side.


Kirby: Well, it helped me live. It helped me stay alive.

TCJ: I mean, do you think it affected the way you drew and the way you --

Kirby: Oh, yes. You can judge it for yourself. You can see my early books on Captain America. I had to draw the things I knew. In one fight scene, I recognized my uncle. I'd subconsciously drawn my uncle, and I didn't know it until I took the page home. So I was drawing reality, and if you look through all my drawings, you'll see reality. When I began to grow older, I grew less . . . You don't really grow less belligerent . . . It stays inside you, somehow, and it always has its uses. . . .

I taught myself how to draw, and I soon found out it was what I really wanted to do . . . I thought comics was a common form of art and strictly American in my estimation, because America was the home of the common man, and show me the common man that can't do a comic. So comics is an American form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper.

TCJ: It's a democratic art.

Kirby: It's a democratic art. It's not a formal art. I feel a fine artist is never through with his work, because it's never perfect to him.

TCJ: . . . the first comic that rejuvenated superheroes that you did was Fantastic Four. Can you explain how that came about?

Kirby: I had to do something different. The monster stories have their limitations -- you can just do so many of them. And then it becomes a monster book month after month, so there had to be a switch because the times weren't exactly conducive to good sales. So I felt the idea was to come up with new stuff all the time -- in other words, there had to be a blitz. And I came up with this blitz. I came up with the Fantastic Four, I came up with Thor, and the Hulk, the X-Men and the Avengers. I revived what I could and came up with what I could. I tried to blitz the stands with new stuff. The new stuff seemed to gain momentum . . .

When people began talking about the bomb and its possible effect on human beings, they began talking about mutations because that's a distinct possibility. And I said, "That's a great idea." That's how the Fantastic Four began, with an atomic explosion and its effect on the characters. Ben Grimm, who was a college man and a fine-looking man, suddenly became the Thing. Susan Storm became invisible because of the atomic effects on her body. Reed Richards became flexible and became a character that I could work with in various ways. And there were others -- mutation effects didn't only affect heroes, it affected villains too. So I had a grand time with the atomic bomb. [Laughter]

TCJ: Stan [Lee] says he conceptualized virtually everything in Fantastic Four -- that he came up with all the characters. And then he said that he wrote a detailed synopsis for [you] to follow.

Kirby: I've never seen it, and of course I would say that's an outright lie.

TCJ: How did you feel during the '60s when Stan became a personality in the books, and sort of became the official spokesman and figurehead for Marvel Comics?

Kirby: Well, Stan became a personality through his relationship with the owner. . . [he was the publisher's cousin].

Stan was a very rigid type. At least, he is to me. That's how I sized him up. He's a very rigid type, and he gets what he wants when the advantage is his. He's the kind of a guy who will play the advantages. When the advantage isn't his at all, he'll lose. He'll lose with any creative guy.

TCJ: . . . What did you think of Stan creating this public personality where everything was stamped with "Stan Lee Presents"? He manufactured himself as a kind of grand figure.

Kirby: I think Stan has a God complex. Right now, he's the father of the Marvel Universe.