WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2012
Fighting to Rescue the Lost Avenger
By BRUCE BENNETT FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Circulation: 2.1 million.)
Last
week, as the pop-cultural world at large watched "The Avengers" rake
in $1 billion in a mere 19 days in theaters, a more specialized group of
comic-book fans had its eye on a related magic number: $155,350.
That was the winning bid for a
single page of "Fantastic Four" comic-book art drawn in 1966 by
original "Avengers" artist Jack Kirby (and scripted by
"Fantastic Four" and "Avengers" co-creator Stan Lee) on the
website of Heritage Auctions.
"We are officially in a new
place as far as comic artwork goes," said the novelist Glen David Gold
who, like many longtime collectors of Kirby's original art, watched the bids
skyrocket out of his reach.
Kirby, a Manhattan native who died
in 1994, co-created "Captain America" with Joe Simon in 1940 when he
was 23 years old. Though the series was launched before the attack on Pearl
Harbor, Kirby and Simon, both the children of Jewish immigrants, had drawn a
bead on the pre-Word War II zeitgeist, conceiving an image of "Cap"
greeting Adolph Hitler with a right hook.
"They made comic books
political in a way that no one had thought of," Mr. Gold said.
They also made them lucrative.
"Captain America No. 1" sold more than a million copies and boosted
Kirby's profile considerably in the burgeoning world of comics.
Two decades later, he came up with
Iron Man, the X-Men, Thor, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Nick Fury and many
other Marvel Comics characters and stories in collaboration with Mr. Lee.
That would have been enough for any
legacy, but after leaving Marvel in 1970, Kirby singlehandedly conjured a
multi-title mythology for rival DC Comics now known as the Fourth World saga.
Incorporating galactic genocide, technology, mysticism and comedian Don
Rickles, the unfinished Fourth World narrative is so uniquely convoluted that
Mr.
Gold compared it to James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake."
"Kirby was like Louis
Armstrong or Miles Davis in that his touch just elevated what he did," Mr.
Gold said. "He turned [comics] from junk into something with real
emotional depth."
With so many of Kirby's creations
now firmly embedded in the popular consciousness, one might assume his
contributions to the canon would be widely known.
Yet few outside the Comic-Con
velvet rope know his name.
Even a shared screen credit with
Mr. Lee and "Captain America" co-creator Joe Simon did not prevent
CNN.com from attributing success of the "The Avengers" to "the
imagination of one man—Stan Lee" on Monday.
But sky-rocketing auction prices
and a new museum in his honor are signaling that Jack Kirby may finally have
arrived.
Randolph Hoppe, the director of the
Hoboken-based nonprofit Jack Kirby Museum, said the man born Jacob Kurtzburg in
1917 remains "one of the most underappreciated geniuses of the 20th
century."
Mr. Hoppe conceived the museum in
2005, around the same time that the availability of bound reprints of Kirby
comics and the value of his original art began to spike.
The museum's mission, Mr. Hoppe
said, is to provide "an educational, literary nonprofit devoted to helping
scholars and keeping the word out there about this amazing creator."
A lifelong fan of Kirby's work and
a multimedia communications consultant with pre-web Internet experience, Mr.
Hoppe has spent the past seven years co-coordinating what he called a
"network of friendly collectors" of Kirby's art to make
first-generation materials that have been priced out of archival and scholarly
hands available for digital study.
A strong web presence and dogged
fan outreach at comic-book conventions and elsewhere (the organization recently
presented a show of Kirby interpretative artwork in Hoboken called "Kirby
Enthusiasm") has moved the Jack Kirby Museum closer to a Phase One goal of
erecting a pop-up gallery in Kirby's native Lower East Side in the fall.
The neighborhood is critical to
Kirby's artistic biography, as his childhood within the teeming melting pot
exerted a profound influence on his later work.
"The Lower East Side was the
most densely populated place in the world at the time," Mr. Gold said.
"Kirby fell into a gang in order to survive and ended up using a lot of
that power and anger and feeling of comradeship when he and Joe Simon created
'Captain America.'"
While his boyhood stomping grounds
fostered creativity, Kirby's heritage denied him certain opportunities.
Like Joe Simon (born Hymie Simon in
Rochester), Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber in Manhattan) and many other pioneers
of the comic-book medium, his Jewish roots hampered access to the worlds of
mainstream illustration and advertising.
"As far as I can tell,
everybody in comics either aspired to newspaper strips or magazine
illustration," Mr. Hoppe said. "Comics were a place to get out
of."
After his success with
"Captain America" and combat service in the war, Kirby returned to a
comics industry in which superhero titles had fallen from favor.
Undaunted, he and Simon freelanced
across multiple genres including romance comics (which they essentially
invented) Westerns, science fiction and horror.
When Simon finally fled comics to
work in commercial art, Kirby, already nearing 50, collaborated with struggling
Atlas Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee in 1961 on a series of new superhero
titles published under the young Marvel label.
The result was "The
Avengers."
"It was totally different than
anything that I'd seen," said Steven Brower, an illustrator and writer, of
his childhood encounter with the first "Fantastic Four" issue.
"It was like it was jumping out of the pages."
Alas, Kirby's financial fortunes
did not keep pace with his creative growth.
The artist's dealings with Marvel
and DC were fractious enough to incline him to never settle down with either
company, and his posthumous stake in his Marvel co-creations has been disputed.
A court ruling last year halted an
effort by the artist's heirs to deny Marvel character copyrights and to collect
additional royalties.
With characters of his
co-conception and his original art breaking records on the screen and in
auction houses, the epitaph for a man name-checked by such baby-boomer literati
as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem remains bittersweet.
Said Mr. Gold, "Kirby's life
was both a triumph of creativity and a tragedy of sharing in the spoils of
it."
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