Jack Kirby biography excerpt

[Koko]

Listers,

Here is a cutting from my new Jack Kirby biography.

Regards,

Greg Theakston

Pure Imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was a modern-day Hans Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm, and Mother Goose rolled into one, though he never expected it to end that way.

He didn’t have the ego for it.

His creations have appeared in newspaper strips, in books, in comic books, on the radio, in magazines, on television, in the movies, and on audio recordings.

This guy’s work is everywhere years after his death, even if you might not know it, though you might want to.

His creations have made billions, yes, billions of dollars for other people, and impressed a lesson on a new generation of creators who refuse to be chiseled by the bigwigs.

The world knows what he did even if they don’t know who he is, and what’s wrong with this picture?

His stories have delighted people for almost seventy-five years, and will probably continue to delight them for at least another. Only Armstrong, Crosby, Sinatra, Elvis, and The Beatles, get that kind of longevity.

He told his tales with pictures as well as text, and penciled roughly 30,000 pages of comic art with an average of six panels per page: a staggering 180,000 finished images.

 

His name is Jack Kirby, and his business was telling stories.

The poverty pockets that dotted the metropolis of Manhattan produced a number of entertainment geniuses. The 1910s and ’20s saw George and Ira Gershwin, the Marx Brothers, James Cagney, and a few others emerge from its slums. Like Kirby, they were all first generation Americans, all with tangible ethnic ancestries, all struggling to escape sad conditions via their respective talents, from the old world to the new.

In the first MERRY MARVEL MARCHING SOCIETY newsletter, Jack Kirby relates on his birth, “The date, August 28, 1917. It turned out to be a gloomy day like all the others, and I was there.

“It was there through rickety childhood, sullen adolescence, in the shadow of the chipped brick walls of the slum, my first drawing board.”

Jack leaves out that Essex Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a more exact location of his birth. His parents had tightened the budget a little bit, so Jake was born on the bed, in a one-room apartment, in a neighborhood he despised for the rest of his life.

No bells rang throughout the kingdom, though a King had been born.

More like a taxi honk.

His parents, Ben and Rose and younger brother Dave eventually made something of a home on Suffolk Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in yet another one-room apartment with one window, with gas wicks waiting to be lit, though they might not be able to pay when the bill came due next month. The rent was $3.00 a week.

Born on January 22, 1922, Dave’s claim to fame was his amazing birth weight of sixteen pounds: a feat made even more amazing when coupled with the fact that he was delivered at home in the bed.

Made the papers.

Jake waited in the hall as his mother screamed while giving birth. Something he might have heard only once before.

The birth of another son was stressful on the already over-taxed father, as he was having trouble making enough money to support three people, much less four. Ben wasn’t very good with English. Spoke Yiddish around the house, and he let his wife take care of real-world business, particularly if involved paperwork. He was stuck in a low-paying position at a pants factory, hardly getting by, and now not getting by even more.

To add insult to injury, Dave had a heart condition, and though he was large, he couldn’t keep up with the rest of the kids. Still, there were moments when Jake needed help from the neighborhood bullies, and Dave’s hulk, charging, was enough to scare them away, his older brother weeping in his arms afterward.

Short and sensitive older brother.

Jack thought that being born short was one of his big mistakes because short people aren’t taken seriously. The only way to achieve that is to be short, and talented, and though he didn’t know it at the time, that’s exactly what he was working at.

At night, all of them slept in the same bed, and if you had to go, you had to go down the hallway. And then the very early noise of the street crammed with horses, and pushcarts, and fresh newspapers and bagels, and what appeared to be a riot of people in the middle of it.

Jake’s earliest escape-hatch was the regulation, sort-of, fire escape. Once Mom was certain her kid’s head could no longer fit through its bars, she allowed him to sun in a black iron playpen with the coolest view of crowds you ever saw from five stories up.

People like ants. Horses the size of horseflies.

That kind of thing might brand itself on your mind, if you were sensitive: a view of hundreds at one time, every time, in the sunshine.

Convict baby might have recalled, “The view is great, but these bars have got to go.”

The only escape from confined was an expansive view.

Okay, Kirby was born on the Lower East Side because his father feared for his life. True story.

Born on January16, 1887 Benjiman Kurtzburg was a resident of Austria, though during the Second World War he claimed Poland as his birthplace. Seems Ben had insulted some guy in Austria during 1907, and the injured party demanded satisfaction the next morning at sunrise.

So, the Kurtzbergs gathered every shekel that they had, and in the middle of the night shipped the guy off with his suitcase, and said, however it’s said in Yiddish, “Go West young man.”

And you would be amazed at how quickly he took their advice.

Once here, Ben Kurtzberg eventually worked in garment factories and provided for his family as best he could, and the family ate regularly if he was working, but you never knew about that.

The idea of a father who couldn’t provide also branded the sensitive boy’s soul. If the father couldn’t do it, who could?

Keep track of that theme throughout this volume. If not his father, who?

In later years, while Jake was doing YOUR HEALTH COMES FIRST!, the feature had an almost obsessive warning about arguments at dinner causing indigestion, and it doesn’t take a Freud to explain the motivation for that. Though Jack never verbalized any tension in his early home life, the feature draws a big red circle around it.

If you fight with your wife at dinnertime, this thing isn’t working.

Kirby quote. “I just drew a villain recently, and he had my father’s angry eyes.”

Still, two kids in our bed every night means nobody is getting laid unless Mrs. Goldbloom on three will watch the two for an hour.

No other children, so I guess she was never in, or not answering.

Worse, the Great Depression struck when Jake was eleven-years-old, and he went to work selling newspapers after school to help the family to make ends meet. One of the smallest of all paperboys in the city, Kurtzberg was frequently trampled when the delivery truck drove up. Conditions like this drove the young Kurtzberg to develop a tough-guy attitude for use on the streets completely unseen in later years, except in his art.

His first art assignments didn’t allow for much expression of angst. “ I used to make signs for the pushcart peddlers on my street. I’d take a paper bag and letter a sign for whatever it was, and the price. Onions, carrots, whatever. I earned a little extra change that way.”

Friendly pushcarts were juxtaposed by unfriendly knuckles. Neighborhood gang wars were a fact of life, and get with the program or get you butt kicked. The Lower East Side was a hard place to grow up in, and still is.

“I saw this gang of guys coming up the street, and I was afraid.” Kirby once related to me. “And so I ducked into this phone booth, see. And these guys all started kicking the phone booth to scare the hell out of me, and I was scared out of my wits.”

Always being small and always afraid makes you a target, wherever you live.

And what is it about these guys from the old Lower East Side that makes them want to say “see” all of the time?

That’s so Edward G. Robinson, see?

It’s hard to say if Jake got pneumonia because he wasn’t dressed well enough to face cold weather, or the pneumonia bug was just going around that week, but Jake caught it. In a pre-penicillin planet, the best you could hope for was a miracle, and only if induced by a choir of Rabbis from your neighborhood. So there they stood, prayed, and rocked over a bed built for four, for twelve hours over a sensitive, sweaty boy.

Apparently they were somewhat successful.

They got a bunch of demons out, but not all of them.

“At that time, we were shut off. We didn’t have as many cars. I remember when we just had wagons. I remember when the iceman delivered ice on his shoulder. He walked up four flights with a block of ice to put it in our refrigerator, not refrigerator. We called it the icebox.

“The bathtub was in the kitchen. That was the kind of apartments we lived in.”

Jacob grew up in an old-time era of biplanes, horse-drawn carts, and silent movies. The Empire State Building hadn’t been blueprinted, and the Chrysler Building hadn’t even been considered.

The heroes of his day were the air aces, the only people who kissed the clouds, and as the grounded public did, Kurtzberg worshipped the flyers. His first serious attempt at a comic strip dealt with airplanes and pilots. Not really for a syndicate, just for Jake, but at least he was drawing on paper. The beginning of a life-long obsession.

 

copyright 2008 Pure Imagination

 

 

[Mike Bray]

[KirbyJack]

I am buying that book.

[aardvark88]

I was happy to see your solicitation in the current Diamond Preview catalog! Autographed copies for forum members?

[Koko]

Listers,

Another cutting, a little OT so forgive me.

Regards,

Greg Theakston

Pure Imagination

 

copyright 2008 Pure Imagination

unfinished,unedited.

Jewish Green Hornets

Kirby’s last days were neither particularly healthy nor happy. He always got a charge out of the fans at the San Diego Cons, but always slept for three hours on the trip home. And, more often then not, Roz as well. I missed our exit once because I didn’t want to wake her to ask directions. When I finally did, it was an “Oy Vey” moment, but we got home okay in the end.

Schwartz usually nodded off in the last third, and I finally had nobody to talk to about old Jazz.

Me dog-tired, and the three of them refreshed, we always had San Diego Sunday dinner at the Thousand Oaks Deli, on the way back to the mountaintop retreat.

The place was very Jewish, as Thousand Oaks seemed to be. Big New York-style menu. And, Jack would dig out his glasses and look over the whole deal, and when the question arose “Well, what’s everybody going to have?” Jack always piped up with his order, then, Roz, who knew the menu like the back of her hand told Kirby what he was going to eat, and it never looked like there was a fight in him about it.

Roz had an allergy to wheat, so she always ordered corn bread. Both doing without what was bad for them. Roz always took care of Jack, and in the end, that was the one thing he counted on.

“Anybody want dessert?” the kind of young, kind of not-Jewish waitress would ask.

“Yea,” Kirby called out. “I’d like a piece of chocolate cake.”

Roz replied, “No, nothing for us, we’re fine, just the check.”

And I had my eye the same layer-cake in the chrome display case as well, but if Jack couldn’t have any, who was I to complain? And while it was never discussed, it seemed like there was some kind of blood sugar condition there.

Then, back up the mountain to Chez Kirby where their second wave of weary kicked in, though my first hadn’t yet been serviced.

Didn’t matter.

Mission accomplished: I got the three people I admire most home safely after a very hard thing. I did it for almost a decade, but it was always a delight and a demand.

If I killed these three icons in a gigantic auto crash, and walked away from it on the San Diego Freeway unscathed I’d be the pariah of the comics community until my death and well past.

And believe me, I swerved more than once on that stretch to avoid sheared-off tires from disabled semis. And, for a decade, it always woke a whole load of old people, and made my hands sweat even more every time

“What da Hell just happened?”

In a car full of Jews, I prayed to Jesus about this thing, again, seems like every late summer.

So, it’s Sunday night, and Jules and I have to get back to our hotel in L.A., and time is a’wastin’.

Warm good-byes at the door, then following us to our rental car, then more warm good-byes, and more thrown kisses as we rolled away at a frightening incline, brakes all of the way down. Okay, if I only kill Julie Schwartz, the crime might be forgiven.

If it happened, the Kirby’s would see it, then where would I be.

When you are Kato to three old Jewish Green Hornets you have to believe that “My Kung-Fu is better than your Kung-Fu.”

And if you are driving, swerve when you have to, but try not to wake any of them.

 

 

[mjacobs8]

Great stuff, more please!

[Koko]

Another cutting

Regards,

Greg Theakston

Pure Imagination

copyright 2008 Pure Imagination

 

On June 25th, leaving from the Pennsylvania Station, Kirby, kissed his wife good-bye, and headed south for Camp Stewart, Georgia. He took his basic training during the fall of 1943 in the 845th battalion. In late August he shipped out at the point of embarkation on the Virginia coastline. The rough waters took their toll on the seasick private attached to Patton's Third Army, Fifth Division. Ahead lay the battle for France.

On St. Patrick’s Day of 1985, in his studio overlooking Thousand Oaks, California, and the mountains that face the great Pacific Ocean, Jack spoke of his wartime experiences. As the sun began to set above them, the light was split by the Venetian blinds, slashing Kirby with amber and black. It perfectly set the mood for the discussion that followed.

 

Theakston: What was the first action that you saw?

 

Kirby: I was a replacement. A replacement for people who had already been wounded, or killed. I went into action right away, my outfit was on the assault. We were heading toward Metz and the objective of my outfit was to take Metz. It was a very hard town to take since it was occupied by the German SS. They were professional soldiers. They had been trained like our Boy Scouts. Remember these people had been educated by Hitler. They'd been trained from the age of twelve to be professional soldiers, not Boy Scouts, but professional soldiers. And when we got there they were our age, young men our age. They were superior soldiers. It was like an amateur baseball team suddenly called in to play against the Yankees or the Dodgers.

Wars are fought by people, and when you meet the enemy, the enemy is people. My first contact with these guys they called me every name in the book. But, I was kind of used to that. In the section of New York where I come from they call you those names anyhow. I knew a bit of German and I knew what they were talking about. They called us "stupid" and "insufficiently_thoughtful_persons", names like that. In my mind, that's what they were afraid of. That's the one thing I'm always afraid of, is stupidity. Stupidity and ignorance are impossible to deal with, and they could see that we were going to give them a hard time. We not only looked stupid, we acted stupid. We weren't going to budge an inch. We weren't going to move. We were stupid. They became afraid of us. I could see it happening. I talked to them. We'd get prisoners in and they'd despise us. We weren't on their level. It changed my idea of wars and people, and the ways battles are fought. I could imagine myself as a modern infantryman suddenly meeting a soldier at Gettysburg. What would we say to each other? It wasn't like the history books, it was like you and I sitting here conversing.

 

T: That's getting pretty close to the enemy.

 

K: Once, I was standing guard in the pitch darkness and I was standing guard for four hours in absolute darkness. I'd been there for four hours and it was three in the morning. It was pitch black, inside a house, and you couldn't see a thing. If you were in that darkness for three of four hours you could make out details in that room. I'm standing next to this wall, and a guy starts coming down the chimney. I'm standing right next to the chimney. Complete darkness, and this guy thinks he's unseen. It's the enemy. I'd been in that darkness so long I watched him come down, and I couldn't understand why he couldn't see me. I figured it out upon reading about the British night fighters who went up in planes and did so well against the night raiders. They kept these aviators in complete darkness for four or five hours, and when they went up into the sky at night they could see the enemy almost as plain as day. They could see every detail, and the enemy couldn't see them coming up to defend themselves. They knocked down the enemy by the score. They couldn't understand why the British were knocking them of in such amounts. When I took him, the guy couldn't understand how it happened.

I went into this French luxury hotel. It was the kind of Hotel that I saw in the movies. There were these beautiful drapes. I went into this hotel and looked it over and I'd never seen one outside the movies. Here I was in one. Spiral staircases, lovely elegant curtains, beautiful beds. A little debris here and there. And, I went back down the steps and I began to tie my laces. I look around me and there are six S.S. standing there. These six Germans were watching me tie my laces. They also had come into this hotel to look it over and scout it out. Maybe I was stupid, but I didn't think anything about it. There were six guys watching me and it's the enemy. Being a human being and being conditioned as I was I didn't think anything about it. I didn't give a damn. I was more concerned with my laces and I was tying them up. I said 'What do you want? Take off!" And of course they weren't going to take off, and they began cursing me again, but this time they said something about my mother, and of course where I come from you say something about anybody's mother and it's curtains. The next thing you know we were all running and shooting and it was like a comedy. We ran in all directions. I got out of there.

Things are different today. I've seen pictures of the Marines, and he's trained differently. He's trained like a machine. He certainly isn't the kind of soldier I was. My experience in the Army was strictly from a human viewpoint. When I drew a story for a comic book, it was a true story. We chased each other up and down the apartment houses. The Germans would chase me down a staircase while part of my outfit was climbing another building, or going into another apartment house. It was a hodge-podge. I was telling somebody that I saw three German officers from a room. I was standing in this building, and they were piling into a car. And here was my chance. I had a bazooka, and I took this bazooka and I shot at these guys, and the whole room caved in on me! I forgot I was standing in a little room and the bazooka has a back flash and the whole room caved in on me. The ceiling and the walls, everything. I was covered with dust and looked like a mess. The lesson there is; don't get into a small room with a bazooka!

As far as I'm concerned, Superman saved my life, because I couldn't believe anybody could kill me. Out of a thousand men, me and four other guys came out of it. People think of war like they think about comics or a Broadway play. They don't think it's serious, that it isn't reality. But it is. You gotta kill that guy. We were holding a brick factory and the SS troopers came busting in the door like an Errol Flynn movie and there's this guy coming toward you with a Schmeizer It's aimed at your head and he

looks like a butcher. He's got all the accouterments on him and he's going to kill you. There's no way out. He's got his gun on you and you've got your gun on him. What do you do? I didn't know what to do until the sergeant who was yelling and screaming at all the guys came over and hit me in the head with his helmet and I shot the guy. It's like being in front of a Mack truck with no way out. There's traffic on one side and traffic on the other side and you're in the middle with this truck heading for you. What do you do?

I remember another time; I was talking to this lieutenant and the next thing I know. I'm all the way in the factory and the lieutenant is a red smear on a wall. He was across the street, a big red smear and I'm knocked all the way into the factory. I ran back, I didn't know what the Hell happened. I didn't hear anything or see anything, and there's three tanks coming up the street with infantry on both sides. This guy took a direct hit while he was talking to me. He was from Brooklyn, and made lieutenant by ROTC in college, so we had something in common. We were talking and the next thing you know, no sound, no nothing like...you know, there you are on the fourth floor of another building and you don't know what the hell you're doing there. This guy's a red smear on a wall and you can't get more undignified than that. Then you're in the real thing.

 

T: So what did you do ?

 

K: I did what I had to do. We were all firing out the windows, and we had two wounded guys waiting for this jeep to take them to the hospital. Next thing we know the wounded guys are dead and the Germans are charging in the factory. There's a German coming at me, one guy from the second floor hits him with a steel-jacketed bullet and this guy goes back through three rooms. Pictures are spilling out his hat, pictures of his mother and father and his girlfriend and him in his Hitler uniform. His whole life in his helmet. These guys were so sure they'd take us, that's why they had all these souvenirs. This went on all the time. I was a veteran five minutes after I got there. We were sitting next to what we called a big ravine. This ravine travels along France. It's hundreds of feet down and it's the middle of winter. We were sitting with replacements in a big field right on the edge of a cliff and the wind is blowing so hard I can't hear a thing. A colonel comes out of his tent with some officers and he's speaking to us, and I can't hear him. The wind is just howling. The last words I hear are something like "Go down there you mumgmgjrdm..." (laughs) These strange sounds are coming up from the wind. I don't know what the hell these sounds are. Then the wind would start howling again and the sounds would disappear. After the colonel's speech he goes back into the tent. They tell us to get on our feet and we walk a thousand feet down this cliff, where a tank battle is going on. Those were the sounds we heard. Guys are running back and forth across the Moselle River, naked. A German runs up to me, his shirt is blasted off and he wants to surrender. He takes his helmet off and I say "Get the hell out of here! I don't know where to go, we're trying to march someplace". We're trying to follow the lieutenant, we're marching in line and this massacre is taking place. Everyone's yelling and screaming. We were there to replace some guys. Finally we replace them and the whole thing is over, everyone's gone.

 

T: You crossed the Moselle River. Tell us about it.

 

K: The Moselle River was contested by us and the enemy, of course. We went over in assault boats, long flat boats. Maybe a hundred years ago we might have seen them on our rivers with long paddles. They held a lot of men. We crossed the river in these long flat boats, and we went on from there. The German's didn't like that, so they began to chase us back to the boats. We were a small force that time. I remember they were firing right into the foxholes were the guys were sleeping. We didn't go into action after we hit shore, and they chased us back to the boats and I hung onto one of the boats. I was the last man out, naturally, and I hung onto one of the boats and I barely made it into the smoke and we barely made it to the other side.

We were down in this deep valley- that's when Patton came around. Patton came in a truck. His eyes were running, his nose was running, he looked miserable. I can't describe him. He looked worse than we did. He's standing in the rain and his uniform is a mess. The truth is lousy. You know, George C. Scott--we would have gone to Hell with him. Here's this jerk Patton standing there yelling at us. He's saying "You bastards, you sons of , you won't cross this river? You see this truck? I'm going to fill this truck with your dog tags if you don't cross this frigging river! So long!" We crossed the Moselle River. The engineers came down. They put the bridges down.

 

T: That's what my father did.

 

K: He saved my life. When he put the white tape down I knew where to go. Naturally we weren’t allowed to stay there so we had to go back and beat this outfit that had chased us across. You know, Gung Ho. It was a matter of guys trying to cope with extreme situations. Those situations turned out to be loony.

We were stuck in one of those spots where the enemy was just plastering us. It was the end of the work. They were ripping up the earth with heavy machine gun fire, tearing us up with 88s. They opened up some kind of an offensive, or they were just plain sore at us. It was the end of the world. Guys were flying through the air, guys hitting the ground. They were ripping up everything in sight-trees, bushes, and the entire shoreline. We didn't know what to do so we lay there, and a guy crawls up to me from out of the rear and says "Take five guys and crawl back about two hundred yards and there is a truck waiting," he says "and go see Marlene Dietrich!" I'm looking at this guy like he was a nut. I figured the war has got him and I should say something nice to him, but I was sore because I was scared. Everything was going up- the whole shoreline was now a ragged chewed up bit of earth. I mean it was chewed up and more was coming in. This guy says 'Do what I tell you, take five men." I did as I was told, so I picked five guys who were just as amazed as I was. I said "We're going to see Marlene Dietrich!" and these guys thought I was nuts. But, this was our big opportunity, they would go nuts too. So they followed me and we went back and there was this truck! The truck takes us seven miles back to a ruined church. She gets out of a car filled with officers, about six guys get out, and then Marlene. They must have been sitting on her. We're sitting there and I'm falling asleep because I'm overtired, and Marlene Dietrich comes out. She's dressed in a knitted wool cap and long G.I. underwear. That's all she's got on, and she's playing this frigging saw and was singing "See What the Boy's in the Back Room Will Have." It made the war very human for me. When I woke up she's gone. They hustled us out of the church and there was a chow line. Everybody's shoving everybody else. The guy in back of me shoved me, I shoved the guy in front of me. The guy in front of me turns around and in German tells me to go screw myself, stop pushing. He says "I'm allowed to be in this line. I'm entitled to this chow. I'm not wearing my helmet so stay the Hell back!" There were three Germans in front of me trying to get chow. Nobody minded. That's the kind of crazy war it was.

 

 

[innocuous]

Thanks for posting. This has been a great read.

 

btw - that deli in Thousand Oaks . . . not that great anymore

[thehumantorch]

Is the book out? I would like a copy.

[Koko]

Guys,

I'm still working on it. I'll announce more on the publication date shortly.

Regards,

Greg Theakston

Pure Imagination

http://www.pureimagination.info

[Sardo Numspar]

I am really looking forward to reading this biography when it is published. I just finished the KIRBY hardcover by Mark Evanier. Unbelieveable story, but really sad that the founder of modern day comics, and WW2 hero, never struck gold.

 

I especially like the description of when Goodman found out that Simon and Kirby were thinking about leaving Timely, and their assistant, Stanley Lieber, swore up and down that he didn't spill the beans. Simon and Kirby were thrown out on the streets. Sixteen years later, Kirby would be rehired at Timely (now Marvel) by its new editor-in-chief, Stanley Lieber n/k/a Stan Lee.

 

Pretty cool stuff.