The genius of Jack Kirby
PAUL GRAVETT reports from two current exhibitions in France celebrating the wartime service and subsequent career of comics legend Jack Kirby
It’s hard to imagine a world without Jack Kirby’s remarkable contributions. And yet in 1926, as a Jewish youngster in New York’s Lower East Side named Jacob Kurtzberg, he had his first brush with death. “When I was nine years old, I got double pneumonia. I was supposed to die. What was going to save me?” His family was too poor to pay for medical treatment. “My mother could not give me up. She called in the rabbis and they all danced around my bed and chanted, ‘Demon, come out of this boy. What is your name, demon?’… I just happened to pull out of it because… I don’t know the reason. But you had to rely on something. God or at least pure chance.” Jacob survived and a decade later achieved his dream of creating comics, in newspapers and in the new publishing phenomenon, comic books.
But he was not out of the fire yet. Seventy-five years ago this summer, Kirby was shipped from England across the Channel to Omaha Beach in Normandy as part of a US army squadron. On 23 August 1944, he stepped off the boat and onto French soil to join the Allies’ ongoing push to liberate Nazi-occupied France. Around him lay the aftermath of the D-Day landings, some 11 weeks before, in which 4,414 Allied troops had died, 2,499 of them Americans. For the first time, the co-creator of Captain America was standing on the battlefield himself, not as his super-powered hero garbed in the stars and stripes, but as a vulnerable, flesh-and-blood GI, plunged into the raw reality of war. Would he even see his 27th birthday in five days’ time?
Kirby’s company was initially sent on to the frontline in Verdun to join General Patton’s push eastwards and to liberate two villages south of Metz, before reaching another, Dornot, on the west bank of the Moselle. During Kirby’s terrifying combat experiences there were heavy losses and close calls, but what finally struck him down was trenchfoot due to the severe cold and damp. Luckily, he was taken out of service on 14 November, although while he was being repatriated and treated en route in Paris and then Hereford, England, he narrowly escaped having both of his feet amputated.
Despite the pain, a wheelchair-bound Kirby agreed to the doctors’ requests to make accurate reference drawings (since lost) of his fellow soldiers’ wounded feet. Eventually, Kirby came home and resumed his career, but what the war had made him see and do would profoundly change him and darken and deepen his work. It’s no accident, for example, that 10 years later, for the first cover of Foxhole (Oct 1954), a comic book based on the testimonies of reallife soldiers, he drew a bloodied, bandaged D-Day survivor trying to write home: “Dear Mom: The war is like a picnic! Today we spent a day at the beach!”
Jack Kirby lived another 50 years, until 1994, working hard in comics and latterly also in animation, as an exceptional creative force, his expansive, visionary concepts often sparking from mythology and technology, pouring from pencil onto paper. Whether in war or Western, horror or humour, Kirby left almost no genre untried, even sharing with business partner Joe Simon in the invention of the romance genre in American comic books. From Fantastic Four in 1961 to The Eternals in 1976, Kirby went on to cocreate, with Stan Lee, much of the Marvel Comics pantheon. Often conflicted, flawed yet principled, these superheroes have become icons worldwide, especially thanks to their recent blockbuster movie adaptations.
Kirby witnessed none of Marvel’s 21st-century ‘Cinematic Universe’. Lee hailed him as ‘The King’, though he was a king without a kingdom, owning hardly any of the copyrights to his (co-)creations. Only recently has he begun to receive proper acknowledgment in the comics and films, after an out-of-court settlement between his estate and Marvel’s owners, Disney. Headhunted by their rivals, DC Comics, in the early Seventies, Kirby cut loose from Lee on his solo epic, four connected titles collectively called ‘The Fourth World’. Here, he escalated World War II to an intergalactic scale, as godlike extraterrestrials from opposing planets bring their conflict to Earth and embroil fragile humankind.
Its centrepiece, New Gods, unmistakably ‘inspired’ Star Wars and is also heading to the big screen.
Appropriately, Kirby is being commemorated this summer with two exhibitions in Normandy. In ‘Kirby’s War’ at Bayeux’s Mediathèque (till 24 August),
every step of his military service and its impact on his subsequent oeuvre, from Boy Commandos in the Forties to The Losers in the Seventies, are recounted in detail by Marc Azéma and Jean Depelley from Passé Simple. The pair have also produced an accompanying documentary. While there are no original artworks on display, the high-quality reproductions of comic-book covers and panels, and rare photos and drawings, including some of Kirby’s illustrated letters home to his wife, make this show immersive and compelling.
Nearby in Cherbourg, as part of their Ninth Biennale of the Ninth Art (the French term for the comics medium), the Musée Thomas-Henry is presenting over 200 pieces of original artwork (until 29 September) in Jack Kirby: The Superhero Galaxy, the largest exhibition ever staged in France about Kirby and his forebears, peers and successors. The opening gallery examines his formative influences in newspaper strips like Popeye and Flash Gordon. Most notable is the 1937 episode of Hal Foster’s sumptuous mediaeval Sunday page serial Prince Valiant, in which the hero uses a goose’s plucked skin and claws to disguise his face as a demon and terrify a villain to death. This striking scene seems to have stayed with Kirby, because in 1972 he designed a very similar-looking monster to star in his DC horror series The Demon. Foster’s own influences probably included the Swedish silent supernatural documentary Häxan (1922), and Kirby may have also seen this himself when it was re-released in the US in 1968 as Witchcraft Through the Ages.
The following galleries in Cherbourg chart Kirby’s trajectory from the Forties to the Eighties and his impact on other artists to this day. The King’s sheer imaginative output month after month comes across when you see a whole wall filled with almost all 20 original pages from Fantastic Four #54 (Sept 1966), one of over 100 issues he worked on. Kirby is in full flow here as both writer and artist, drawing panel by panel in pencil and writing notes on the story in the margins for Stan Lee to dialogue and complete. Kirby’s cast includes African technocrat the Black Panther, hidden alien race the Inhumans and the resurrection of the legendary Prester John. Equally striking are two walls in the penultimate Fourth World gallery presenting an entire issue of Forever People and every page from ‘Even Gods May Die’, his prequel to the New Gods’ conclusion, The Hunger Dogs. Twenty-five years since his death, Kirby’s legacy to popular culture is more vital and inspiring than ever.
Kirby’s War: www.les7lieux.fr/ les-temps-forts/66-l-expositionevenement.
Jack Kirby: The Superhero Galaxy: www.cherbourg.fr/infos-services/ culture-et-loisirs/musees/museethomas-henry/les-expositionstemporaires-1736.html.