Jack The King Kirby: Comic Creator By Matthew Rizzuto

The legendary and influential comic book artist who co-created the iconic characters and classic superheroes for Marvel Comics, like Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, The Uncanny X-Men, Black Panther, Silver Surfer and truckloads of so many, many more, gave the world so much to be amazed by. His Kirby crackle resounds throughout the comic book story!!! In remembrance of possibly the most inspiring artist ever, I give you Jack Kirby, the man, the myth, the mensch!!!!

When I was growing up, I didn’t just read Superman comics and those alone. Nope. I read many, many other great comics from many other great comics companies, with many outstanding characters with great superheroes and fantastic supervillains, destined to take each other on and win.

That’s the kind of style of stunning storytelling that makes Jack Kirby, “THE KING”.

Sure, it’s a title to have, but here’s much to be attributed with that.

The gallant superheroes may be what they desire to be, with outrageous costumes, a stupendous sense of decency, great attitudes and have a streak of good within them that can NEVER be shattered or tarnished.

The nefarious supervillains may be what they claim to be, with fantastic costumes, strange vehicles, bizarre views and firmly believe that evil is hip and cool.

I hate to say it, but it happens.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter because brilliant, epic storytelling will be shared from the masters of the those who know the intricate workings, the rudiments, the craft and the understanding of how to make dreams go further.

That’s the magic that Jack Kirby chose to share with the entire world.

The work of Jack The King Kirby helped define the superhero and brought thrilling tales of wonder and adventure to millions throughout the world.

In my humble opinion, if he was still with us, I believe that Jack Kirby would be enormously touched, by the fact that his children have worked so unbelievably hard creating a Smithsonian-sized museum in his honor, to know what his opinion is all of the highly successful Marvel movies and “Captain America” films, to consider what his opinion would be of the Captain America statue that bears he and Joe Simon’s names on the side of it, just to listen to what he’s gotta say about the fact that a beer that now exists named after him, his thoughts on the asinine, horrific comments and claims that silly Stan Lee has made about being the creator of The Marvel Universe and NOT Jack, his opinions and views of the incredibly wonderful cast of characters that he’s chose to create and give the world, where they’ve gone and what characters he might’ve created, if he was given the opportunity and chance to live to be 100 years old.

The mesmerizing comic book artist Jacob Kurtzberg would have been over 100 years old if he would’ve lived today. Known worldwide as Jack The King Kirby, his dynamic visuals and incredible imagination practically invented the look of comics, as we know them today.

At Marvel Comics, he was revolutionizing the image of the superhero and giving birth to legendary characters, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and more.

Seriously, the list is endless!!!!

At DC Comics, he invented Kamandi, Etrigan The Demon, Darkseid and The Fourth World Saga!!! Kirby’s kid gangs Boy Commandos and The Newsboy Legion and more.

Seriously, the list is endless!!!!

I swear, the vividness of the man overshadows the beauty of his work. I really wish I could have met the guy.

I mean, this as the highest compliment: Kirby was real, just as Jack Kirby himself was with his work and the great stories he shared and the wonderful superheroes he created. It’s good to know people, just like Jack Kirby, could exist on our world like that.

You see, Jack Kirby was an inarguable titan of the comic book industry and quickly became one of the most influential voices in the history of the medium. It didn’t matter if it was westerns, romance, war, horror, sci-fi, humor, superheroes or anything else.

Shockingly enough, Jack The King Kirby could do it all through genre-defining stories and charted a decade-spanning course for graphic fiction as a whole because Kirby was a man who left an indelible mark upon the medium, using his peerless imagination to create some of the greatest stories and characters ever told.

When it comes to Jack The King Kirby, there is no greater contributor to the marvelous medium of comics, other than Will Eisner, Bill Finger, Jim Steranko or Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Maybe, I’m wrong, but it’s just my opinion.

Kirby created and co-created many iconic characters and classic superheroes that have become household names: Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Silver Surfer, Black Panther, The New Gods, Darkseid and among many, many others.

Kirby’s influence so deeply embedded in the medium. This is the guy who co-created the original Nazi-puncher Captain America in 1941.

In the 1950’s, Kirby and his partner, the stupendous Joe Simon, pioneered the romance comics genre.

Don’t forget that in the 1960’s, along with Stan Lee, Kirby co-created more than half of the characters in The Marvel Universe.

In 1961, Kirby and Stan Lee gave the medium a much-needed shot in the arm with Marvel’s Fantastic Four #1. It was a humongous hit and revolutionized the medium, ushering in a golden age, within The Silver Age, for superhero comics. Soon thereafter, they introduced The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor and reintroduced Captain America.

Stylistically, Kirby practically wrote the book on how to create dynamic comic pages with powerful fight scenes, dramatic character development and outrageous costume design.

If not for Jack The King Kirby, comic books might not have seen the explosive growth in three contiguous decades and over several different genres. Storytelling techniques might have more slowly developed instead of being steroid-infused with the energy that flowed from Kirby’s pen. He propelled this art form forward so quickly, that without Jack The King Kirby, creators might still be looking for the inspiration to create stories with the intensity that he created decades ago.

Kirby’s writing was really indivisible from his art, which as comic fans we say we recognize, but instead we damn with faint praise. There is something so primal with what Jack did that we underestimate it. I was thrilled to share a dais with him.

For a long time, Jack The King Kirby didn’t get his due as co-creator of many Marvel characters that have now found new life on the big screen. Today, I’m proud to say, that has changed.

To tell the story accurately, on August 28th, 1917, in New York City’s rough-and-tumble Lower East Side, the most visionary and significant artistic innovator of the 20th and so far, the 21st Century was born. Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg to Austrian immigrants in Manhattan.

The origin of Kirby’s battles with Marvel Comics go all the way back to his collaborations with Stan Lee, who, as part of the “Marvel Method” assigned plot summaries to artists, left while they plotted and penciled the comic, and then wrote dialogue over their work.

This was a method born partially of necessity: The overworked Lee wasn’t just Marvel’s primary writer, he was also the main editor with a stable of books to get out.

As a result, though, Kirby was often the driving influence behind many of the stories they worked on. In one oft cited example, Lee told Kirby simply: “Have The Fantastic Four fight God”. Kirby came back with a fully plotted saga of Galactus The World Eater and The Silver Surfer, characters who went on to become major figures in the Marvel Universe.

As their comics grew incredibly popular, Kirby began to push for recognition for his role in plotting stories and creating characters. He made little headway. Stan Lee aimed for the sky.

Lee’s legacy at Marvel is immortal, but so too is the debate and controversy over what that legacy specifically is. In some quarters in comics and especially to devotees of Kirby, Stan Lee is a supervillain–a man who stole credit and corresponding fortunes, from the people who truly shaped Marvel creatively in the 1960’s, relegating them to also-ran obscurity.

Frustrated with his lack of both credit and creative control and angry at Marvel’s continual refusal to offer him a share of the money his creations were raking in, Jack The King Kirby eventually left for DC Comics.

In 1970, Jack The King Kirby left Marvel Comics for DC Comics, creating his Fourth World Saga, introducing intergalactic despot Darkseid as one of DC’s primary villains. He returned to Marvel in the mid-1970’s and by the late 1970’s, he entered the animation field, working on, “Thundarr The Barbarian”.

In 1979, Kirby drew concept art for a proposed movie adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s “Lord of Light”. While nothing happened with the film, this artwork was used in the 1979-81 Iran Hostage Crisis, where CIA operative Tony Mendez rescued six U.S. diplomats from Iran, pretending they were a film crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie. This inspired 2012’s Academy Award-winning movie, “Argo”, starring Ben Affleck. In the film, Jack Kirby was played by noted actor character actor, Michael Parks.

As recorded in Sean Howe’s breathtakingly marvelous book, “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story”, Kirby gave an interview shortly after his departure: “I was never given credit for the writing I did”, he said. “It was my idea to do The Fantastic Four the way it was…I had to come up with new ideas to help the strip sell. I was faced with the frustration of having to come up with new ideas and then having them taken from me.”

In the mid-1970’s, the United States Congress revised the laws around copyrights, offering longer periods of ownership for copyright holders, that is, if the proper paperwork could be provided.

Marvel Comics realized, especially after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s public fight to receive compensation and recognition for their invention of Superman in 1975, that many of its previous contracts were legally questionable, remnants of the comics industry’s fly-by-night origins with regards to creative work.

In 1978, the company began handing out freelancer contracts that guaranteed the company “forever all rights of any kind and nature in and to the work”.

As Michael Dean wrote in a 2002 issue of The Comics Journal, these “work for hire” contracts were partly a result of the superhero boom Kirby himself had a hand in creating.

“It wasn’t just monthly comic books that were at stake any more”, Dean wrote. “It was the vast ancillary potential of licensing and merchandising the content of those comics.” The contracts legally formalized what had previously been loosely assumed to be corporate policy, but having it in writing gave many comics freelancers pause for thought. When Kirby got the contract, he refused to sign it and left Marvel for good.

Guess what?! Marvel wasn’t done with him. When the company began offering to return original artwork it had long held in storage, it did so by referring to the art as a “gift”.

In exchange, the creators had to sign a one-page release agreeing that the art had been produced as work for hire. Most did, though with reservations. Kirby himself, sick of fighting over ownership, indicated his own willingness to sign, but instead of the standard release, Marvel sent him and him alone, a four-page document in 1984.

The contract offered a parade of indignities, Dean wrote: Kirby would have no ownership of the physical artwork, would be unable to copy, reproduce or sell any portion of it, and in effect had only the right to store the work for Marvel. Marvel could call the work back at any time to be “revised” or “modified”.

More galling, signing the contract would not only turn over Kirby’s legal rights to his characters, it would force Kirby to surrender any rights Marvel wasn’t already entitled to, forbidding him from assisting others in disputing copyrights or complaining—even in private—of the document’s unfairness.

The worst of all, the contract only offered 88 pages out of the thousands of pages of work Kirby had produced for them. By signing, Kirby would acknowledge that he was entitled to nothing more.

Kirby hit the roof. For three years, he and Marvel fought over the return of his art. Enraging him further, some of his original pages began appearing for sale by private dealers, likely the result of thefts from the famously disorganized Marvel storage.

Part of Marvel’s intransigence, Dean wrote, came from their concern that any ground they gave Kirby could be interpreted as legal proof of ownership.

Eventually, though, the sheer hurricane of bad publicity and pressure from the rest of the comics industry forced them to cave. In return for signing the original release guaranteeing Marvel’s ownership, Kirby got 1,900 pages of artwork back and creator credits on many of his characters. He would not, however, see financial compensation or residuals for his work.

All of this might seem like ancient history, but as the comics writer Kurt Busiek noted, the 1970’s change in copyright law didn’t just extend periods of ownership. It also provided a window whereby copyright sellers could renegotiate sales. Kirby didn’t live to see that window open: He died on February 6, 1994 from heart failure at 76.

In 2009, Kirby’s heirs filed notices of termination with Marvel, which the law allowed them to do.

For Marvel, which had been profiting mightily off of the boom in superhero films, this sparked a panic.

The company had recently been bought by Disney for $4 billion and had begun releasing its own superhero films—Iron Man, Thor, The Incredible Hulk—all of which were making a healthy profit and all of which were based directly on Kirby’s work.

Marvel sued Kirby’s heirs to stop the copyright termination, arguing once again that Kirby’s creations had been work for hire.

This proved an unexpectedly difficult point to nail down. “It’s not about whether Kirby knew Marvel got all rights,” Busiek explained. “It’s about whether Kirby owned the rights and sold them or whether he was just an employee, and Marvel owned all his ideas before they even came out of the pencil.”

Obviously, Marvel was gambling on the latter.

The resulting legal fight lasted five years, with claims, counterclaims and appeals.

In 2014, it came within a whisker of landing before the Supreme Court, with the Writer’s Guild, Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild—among others—filing amicus briefs arguing against Marvel.

Within mere hours before the United States Supreme Court went into conference to decide whether or not to take the case, Marvel opted to settle.

When Disney lawyers magically back off, you know it’s significant.

As Dominic Patten noted in his coverage for Deadline, the resulting agreement likely came from panic. The company would have had to negotiate with the Kirby family for everything, including back-royalties on hits like Guardians of The Galaxy and rights for The Avengers characters, which was something the Kirby family could have fairly demanded multimillions for.

There were further implications Marvel wanted to avoid as well. “A wide variety of copyrights across the industry, including those at Warner Bros. and DC Comics, would suddenly be in play”, Patten wrote.

Freelancers or those with work-for-hire status—such as writers and composers—could gain rights to their work, as if they were traditional employees.

The long battle between Kirby and Marvel had—for now—been laid to rest.

While the details of the 2014 settlement between Marvel and the Kirby family are secret. It’s likely—given the amount Marvel stood to lose if the case went to trial—that the terms were generous.

While Kirby’s family may have finally received some measure of compensation, they are very much the exception.

The history of comics creators getting shafted as their work went on to make thousands is a long one. A quick sampling of names: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the genius creators of Superman, who lost ownership of their creation in 1947 and were cast aside, only receiving cover credits and meager financial compensation in the mid-1970’s. Think about it, for 27 years, the inventors of Superman didn’t see not dime for the multimillions, if not billions of dollars that Superman made for the company known today as DC Comics, leaving Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster practically destitute beyond words.

Speaking of DC Comics, there’s also the case involving writer Bill Finger, who did the majority of work creating Batman, only to see his co-creator Bob Kane walk away with a ironclad contract for sole credit and royalties, which he largely maintains, that is, until 2015.

Bill Mantlo, the creator of Rocket Raccoon, has substantial medical bills and his family often requests help from the public in meeting them.

Gary Friedrich, one of the creators of Ghost Rider, once attempted to sue Marvel for control of the character, only to be hit with a countersuit demanding $17,000 in damages for the author’s sale of unlicensed merchandise at conventions, a commonly accepted practice.

In a related story, who can forget Alan Moore, who produced the seminal graphic novel Watchmen under an agreement that the rights would revert to him when it went out of print, only to find that DC Comics had no intention of allowing that to happen.

It’s a well-known fact in the comics industry and fandom that while comic book superhero films make hundreds of millions at the box office, many creators of classic characters rarely see a penny for their work. They often have to rely on gorgeous charity organizations, like the Hero Initiative—founded to help comic artists in financial need—if they’re alive and they have little to leave to their families after they’re dead.

This is, of course, completely legal under current definitions of copyright law, regulations that have been repeatedly altered to help protect the corporations that hoard intellectual property, but it’s also the sort of thing the companies in question largely prefer not to talk about.

The way I look at it, we must always be grateful for what Kirby gave us.

In the end, I stand and declare: Long Live Jack The King Kirby: Creator of Greatness!!!!

Thank You.