There was a time when the work of one of the 20th Century’s greatest artists could be had for a dime.
That artist is the subject of a new exhibition: “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity,” which opened last week at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Kirby was the creator or co-creator of many of the most iconic superhero characters ever dreamed up – Captain America, the X-Men, the Avengers, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor and more – as well as a stylistic innovator whose work changed the industry and has continued to reverberate over the decades.
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A combat veteran of World War II, Kirby served as an infantry scout, often entering hostile areas alone to gauge the danger – “If somebody wants to kill you, they make you a scout,” Kirby once told an interviewer. He saw horrors up close, channeling those experiences into war comics like “Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos,” “Battle” and “The Losers” among them – as well as introducing Captain America by showing him socking Adolf Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first comic.
The exhibition shows the dizzying range of Kirby’s work, its development and evolution over time, and its inventiveness and continuing influence on our culture. My colleague Peter Larsen wrote about the exhibit, and I got to walk through it with co-curator Ben Saunders, who grew up in Wales reading Marvel Comics and eventually became a professor of English at the University of Oregon, where he founded the first comic studies minor in the world about 15 years ago.
Saunders makes the case for Kirby as one of the artistic giants of the last century, citing his influence on everything from comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe to musicians like Paul McCartney (who wrote “Magneto & Titanium Man” based on Kirby’s work) and masked rapper MF Doom as well as inspiring novelists such as Jonathan Lethem and Glen David Gold, the latter an expert on Kirby who contributed rare materials to the exhibit.
There’s a quote from Kirby on one of the walls, and it’s as good a description of the work as you’ll find: “I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome.”
As a reader and a comic book fan (whose first comic was a ‘70s-era issue Jack Kirby Captain America issue), I had plenty to talk to Prof. Saunders about, but don’t worry: The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What makes Jack Kirby so special?
There are a bunch of comic book artists that I loved when I was 15: John Byrne, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson. But I don’t like them now any more than I did when I was 15.
With Kirby, as I have matured, my ability to appreciate what he is doing has only grown, which I think means he was doing something different. As a kid, it could almost be off-putting. I certainly wouldn’t have ranked him as a better artist than Neal Adams, and now I think of him as one of the most important American artists of the last 100 years in any media.
Q. That’s a strong claim. Can you talk more about that?
You could think about it in terms of the longevity of his influence across fields. I teach this stuff to 19-year-olds of every race and gender, and they react to Kirby in ways that they don’t necessarily react to perfectly competent – excellent – comic book artists of the same era. Curt Swan is just not going to get them excited in the way that Jack Kirby does.
You can see his fingerprints are all over the imagination of the 21st century. In the area of the novel, in the area of popular music, particularly hip-hop, in the area of contemporary film, and, of course, in the area of contemporary comics, Jack’s hand is on everything. How many artists could we say that about who died in the ‘90s and who were doing their peak work probably between the ‘60s and ‘70s?
His reputation is probably higher now than at any point in his lifetime. So these are all things that suggest to me I’m backing a winner in terms of making a broad claim for his real genius.
Q. What can you tell us about his war comic, “Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos,” which I read growing up?
Jack, who had served [in World War II] by this point, is trying to destroy the racist myth that people of color didn’t make good warriors, couldn’t be good soldiers. So the Howling Commandos are self-consciously and ethnically mixed, where you’ve got your Italian, you’ve got your Jewish member, you’ve got Gabe Jones, the African American, and Dum Dum Dugan, the Irish American. They’re all part of this team.
I’ve seen some people react to the representation of the Howling Commandos as a whitewashing of the war because, of course, one of the great ironies of World War II is that we fought Nazis with a segregated army. My own grandfather fought in World War II, and his only encounter with Americans was when he was in the service. One of the only things I remember him saying about that was how shocked he was at the treatment of Black servicemen. It genuinely appalled him.
So I understand why people would see this as a kind of retroactive whitewash, but that’s actually a misunderstanding of Kirby’s goal. Kirby’s whole point was, yes, that was terrible, and I’m going to show you a military unit where the whole point is that all of America can serve and all have a place.
When this [comic] first came out, the colorist assumed that there couldn’t possibly be a Black person in the unit, so Gabe Jones was colored in the same pink tone as everybody else. Jack had to have it corrected.
Q. Kirby, who created Captain America with Joe Simon, famously introduced the character by showing him punching Adolf Hitler on the book’s first cover – but people forget this was in 1940, before the country was even at war. In the exhibit, you show footage of a 1939 American Nazi rally in New York City and make a connection between the two.
As I was doing the research, I did know about this event, but I didn’t know it had been filmed so I stumbled over it. And I watched this really stunning seven-minute movie and then I’m putting the dates and locations together and having this scholarly, obsessive moment where I’m calling up the map of Manhattan trying to figure out where the old version of Madison Square Garden was in relation to Jack and Joe’s office in Manhattan. And I’m realizing, this is where they would have gone to see boxing matches, they would have gone to see shows at Madison Square Garden – and the Nazis are in their neighborhood.
It came home to me with a whole new immediacy. This is 12 months before Pearl Harbor, so we know they’re not cashing in on war but it’s only a few months after this [rally], so I think the two of them were like, ‘Those [expletive] Nazis came to our neighborhood!’ and then they invent an American hero whose job it is to punch Nazis. This can’t be a coincidence.
Joe Simon tells a story about how their offices started to get phone calls and hate mail from Nazis after this came out. Jack apparently misunderstood and thought that there were Nazis in the lobby, and he ran downstairs so he could punch them. When he got there, he was disappointed there weren’t any Nazis to fight.
Q. Tell us about this drawing Kirby drew of Jacob and the Angel from the Book of Genesis. You said it’s the image you most wanted to have in the show.
It’s Jacob and the Angel, which means you’ve got a foundational Jewish story, but then he’s rendered the angel as a piece of Kirby tech. I’m kind of obsessed with his obsession with technology, because I think it’s one of the places where he discovers a kind of delirium of drawing.
One of the things that makes him a great artist – and not just a great comic book artist, but a great artist – is that he has themes. And one of his themes is what my friend Charles Hatfield calls “the technological sublime.” So the fact that we see all of these things coming together. We see Jewish myth, a personal identity piece, and then you see the lifelong obsession with tech.
It’s also prescient, right? I mean, we’re all wrestling with technology right now. We’re in the mess that we’re in right now because [gestures to his phone] we can’t put the angel down: ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’ We could all be saying that to our phones.
Q. You grew up in Wales. Were American comics easy to find there?
When I was six years old, my parents would take me to my grandmother’s house every Friday night and come and get me on Saturday. It was their night off.
The key hadn’t quite turned for me as a reader. And one day I arrived when my grandmother bought me something called Spider-Man comics weekly [which featured condensed stories from a range of Marvel comics].
That was my entrée. Somebody had actually gone through and corrected the spelling, adding ‘u” back into all the words because they didn’t want British parents saying, ‘This American rubbish means our kids can’t spell ‘colour’ anymore!’
Q. Even as a comic book reader whose first purchase was a ‘70s-era Jack Kirby Captain America, I was surprised by how moved I was by some of this exhibit.
I have teared up in front of pieces of original comic art. For some part of myself, there’s still a connection to the idea that this is the America that I fell in love with before I ever moved here. This is the sort of aspirational America of discovery and adventure and decency and inclusivity.
Also, it’s being really acutely aware of it as a made thing, that this is a fantasy that somebody had at a drawing board and that they sat there and painstakingly rendered every single one of those lines.
