Had he still been alive, Jack Kirby would have been 94 today. In light of this, and recent events involving the Kirby estate, I reread Mark Evanier’s wonderful Kirby: King of Comics monograph today.
Seeing his fifty-year career compressed into a scant 200 pages is like witnessing someone being pummeled by a cage fighter — no matter where his career took him, he was continually being screwed-over by shysters, nepotists and outright liars; denied the earnings and even recognition that he not only deserved, but outright demanded. In today’s fan-run comics industry, this kind of practice is still mostly intact: creators get recognition, but are still denied the job security and pension that Kirby and his contemporaries railed so hard to receive. Indeed, the modern industry helps cast a somewhat lugubrious light on his career. It’s almost taken for granted that mainstream comics now are “the entertainment biz” and is a somewhat prestigious, exclusive — dare I say glamourous? — field. Kirby’s time was different:
…he’s trying to do the most important thing he believes a man can do: provide for his family, bring home a paycheck. Nothing else matters if you don’t manage that.Evanier, pp. 15
No matter what happened, how high his star rose, how over- or underworked he became, how beaten-down by the system he was, it always came back to family. All the wild space vistas and superhuman struggles weren’t done out of a need to live out impotent boyhood dreams, but out of love. It seems that his prodigious imagination was spurred on by that basic human drive to care for his own — he knew that in order to keep working, he had to be better than everyone and only then could he reliably give his family what they needed.
It seems so obvious now to look back on his seminal work and see how it all comes back to community and family: The Newsboy Legion, The Boy Commandos and, of course, The Fantastic Four. That The Thing is his clear analogue in that family speaks volumes about how Kirby’s self-image had been beaten down over the years. He wasn’t the educated, dashing Reed Richards, nor the hot-headed raconteur Johnny Storm (that was Joe Simon and later, lamentably, Stan Lee who was able to sell Jack’s ideas to publishers and editors;) no, he was the gruff slugger that, in spite of a coarse exterior, always held family as a main priority.
Earning a living. Being a provider. The only two things Kirby really seemed to want in his life. That now, after his passing, his creations are helping to line the pockets of Hollywood producers, it’s infinitely more tragic that the courts deny his family even a small slice of those profits. Sometimes it can be difficult to side with the families in these cases — the saga of the Frazettas being one in recent memory that may have soured us to entitled money grubbers — but the case here is one that Kirby fought almost all his life. Even in death, he continues to be beaten down by the same shysters and liars (a certain Smilin’ Someone continuing to swindle his old partner) which only compounds this travesty of justice.
But, the family’s appeals are working their way through the Kafkaesque nightmare of the court system, so perhaps there is some hope on the horizon. On the man’s birthday, it’s not the time to wallow in his failures and rather reflect on the glories. Let’s remember those timeless characters and iconic panels that blasted their way through our memory and into our history, those works of pure imagination that transcended reality and, ultimately, were made out of love.
-- Gavin Lees
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