Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
up a file that is quite literally heavy. Hey,
you're not kidding. And I don't just mean the
physical weight of, you know, all the source
material we have here, the biographies, the art
books, the legal histories. I mean, the cultural
weight. We're talking about a subject that defined
the visual vocabulary of the 20th century and,
well, arguably the 21st century so far. It's
almost impossible to overstate the stakes here.
I mean, if you've walked into a movie theater
in the last 15 years, if you've streamed a blockbuster
series. Right. Or even if you just recognize
the iconography of pop culture, the shield, the
hammer, the angry green giant. are living in
a world that was, in the large part, designed
by one man's pencil. We are talking about Jack
Kirby. The king. But the fascinating thing about
digging into these sources is that the king title,
it feels almost ironic when you look at the reality
of his life. Because this wasn't a coronation,
it was a brawl. From day one, it was a fight
against poverty, against the industry, against
Nazis, and eventually against the very companies
he helped build. That is the core tension we
really need to explore today. The mission of
this deep dive, you know, it isn't just to list
the characters he created because we would be
here for a week. Literally a week. The mission
is to understand the engine that drove him. We
want to look at how a kid from the Lower East
Side of New York, a child of immigrants, used
what he called a factory work ethic to manufacture
a modern mythology. And manufacture is the key
word there. We're going to get into the nuts
and bolts of how he worked. The terrifying reality
of his time in World War II and the legal battles
for creator rights that are still rippling through
the entertainment industry today. It's a story
about art, yes, but it's also a story about labor.
Exactly. It's about the difference between owning
an idea and selling an idea. And it starts in
a very specific place with a very specific smell
and sound. Let's rewind to 1917, the Lower East
Side. Jacob Kirchberg is born. To understand
Kirby. You have to understand the environment
of the Lower East Side in the early 20th century.
It was crowded. It was loud. It was desperate.
That's a pressure cooker. That's a great way
to put it. It was a melting pot, but not in the
gentle sense. It was a pressure cooker. Jacob,
who we'll call Kirby, though he didn't take that
name until later, was the son of Austrian Jewish
immigrants Rose and Benjamin. And his father,
Benjamin, he's a really pivotal figure in this
psychological profile, isn't he? Absolutely.
Benjamin Kurtzberg was a garment factory worker.
And the sources all emphasize that Kirby grew
up watching his father go to work, come home
exhausted, and then do it all over again the
next day. There was no romance in it. It was
survival. But the interesting twist here is that
Kirby didn't look at that factory work with disdain.
He didn't say, I'm going to be an artist so I
can escape that kind of labor. He actually absorbed
the rhythm of it. That is the crucial insight.
You know, many artists develop this sort of ivory
tower view of creation. So you wait for the muse.
You wait for the muse to whisper in your ear.
You need the lighting to be perfect. Kirby viewed
art as a trade. He viewed it through the lens
of his father's garment factory. You clock in.
You produce. You clock out. He literally described
his work later in life as manufacturing pictures.
Factory in a sense. That's a quote. And that
mentality, it explains the sheer volume of his
output later on. We're talking about over 20
,000 pages of published art. Wow. And that's
just what made it to print. The actual number
of drawings he produced is probably incalculable.
But before he could become a one -man factory,
he had to learn the machinery. And even as a
kid, the sources say he was unusually fast. Too
fast. That's the phrase that kept coming up.
There's this telling anecdote about the Educational
Alliance. This was a local settlement house that
offered art classes to kids in the neighborhood.
Kirby went there, eager to learn, and they rejected
him. Rejected him? For being bad at it? No, for
being disruptive because he drew too fast with
charcoal. That is incredible. It's like kicking
a runner off the track team for finishing the
race before the coach blew the whistle. It disrupted
the flow of the class. But it shows that his
brain was just processing images faster than
his hand could physically move. And his hand
was moving pretty darn fast. He didn't have the
patience for the slow academic study of art.
He did try the formal route, though. He enrolled
in the Pratt Institute, which is a massive deal.
That is a prestigious art school. And he got
in at age 14. And he lasted exactly one week.
He walked out. And his reasoning for it is basically
the mantra for his entire career. He said, I
wasn't the kind of student that Pratt was looking
for. They wanted people who would work on something
forever. I didn't want to work on any project
forever. I intended to get things done. I intended
to get things done. That is the factory mindset
versus the gallery mindset. Precisely. And you
got to remember the timing here. This is the
1930s. The Great Depression is in full swing.
Getting things done wasn't just an artistic preference.
It was an economic necessity. If you didn't finish
the job, you didn't get paid and you didn't eat.
So he drops out of Pratt. He hits the pavement,
and he enters the workforce right as the visual
medium is starting to shift. But he doesn't go
straight to comic books, because comic books
as we know them, they barely existed. Right.
He starts at the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate
in 1936, doing strips and single -panel cartoons.
But the real technical training in the Graduate
School of the King happens in 1939 at Fleischer
Studios. The animation house? The home of Popeye?
Popeye Betty Boop. Now, Fleischer was a rival
to Disney, but their style was grittier, more
urban, and working there was essentially working
on an assembly line. Kirby was hired as an in
-betweener. Okay, for the listener who might
not know the technical side of traditional animation,
let's unpack in -betweener. Right, so in traditional
hand -drawn animation, a lead animator draws
the keyframes. Let's say Popeye winding up for
a punch and then Popeye's fist connecting. Those
are the two main beats. B and B. Exactly. The
in -betweener has to draw every single frame
between those two points to make the movement
look fluid. It sounds incredibly tedious. It
is grueling, repetitive, wrist -destroying work.
You're drawing the same figure slightly moved,
over and over, hundreds of times a day. And Kirby
hated it. He compared it directly to his father's
sweatshop. He said it was manufacturing pictures
in the worst way. No creativity, just output.
However, looking at his later work, you can see
the fingerprints of this experience, can't you?
Oh, absolutely. This is where he learned the
physics of motion. He learned how bodies compress
and extend. If you look at a Jack Kirby comic
book panel from the 60s, the characters never
look static. They look like compressed spring.
They're about to explode off the page. Exactly.
They look like they are mid -explosion, that
kinetic energy. That comes from struggling through
those in -between frames at Fleischer. So he
takes the skill set from the animation factory,
but he leaves the job. And around this time,
we start to see the name game, because he wasn't
signing his work, Jacob Kritzberg. No. Not at
all. He was trying on identities like he was
trying on clothes. He was working for a shop,
a place called Eisner and Iger, which created
comics on demand for publishers. And he used
a phone book of pseudonyms. Jack Curtis. Kurt
Davis. Fred Sandace. Ted Gray. Teddy. It's interesting.
It feels like he's running from something. He
was running from Jacob Kurtzberg. You have to
remember, anti -Semitism was very real and very
casual in America at this time. He wanted to
sound American. He wanted to escape the ethnic
sound of the Lower East Side. He wanted a name
that sounded like the tough guys you saw in the
movies. And eventually he lands on Jack Kirby.
He chose it because it reminded him of the actor
James Cagney. The ultimate tough guy. Exactly.
Short, pugnacious, taking no guff from anyone.
It was an act of assimilation, but it was also
an act of self -creation. He wasn't just drawing
heroes, he was sculpting himself into one. He
wanted to be the American tough guy. So he has
the name, he has the speed, he has the factory
discipline. Now he needs the partner. And this
brings us to one of the most significant partnerships
in pop culture history. The Lennon and McCartney
of the Golden Age. Simon and Kirby. Joe Simon.
Joe Simon was an editor at a place called Fox
Feature Syndicate. Kirby was working there, freelancing,
making about 15 bucks a week. Which, to be fair,
was okay money for a kid in the Depression, but
it wasn't a fortune. Right. Simon recalls seeing
Kirby's work for the first time and just being
floored. He said, I love Jack's work, and the
first time I saw it, I couldn't believe what
I was seeing. It was that raw power, right? It
didn't look like the stiff, polite illustrations
in other books. It had violence. It had impact.
So Simon, who was very business savvy, grabs
Kirby. They start freelancing together as a team.
And eventually, in 1940... They land at Timely
Comics. Timely, which would eventually evolve
into Marvel Comics. Correct. And the publisher
there was a man named Martin Goodman. He hired
Simon as an editor, and Simon brought Kirby along
as the art director. And this is 1940. We have
to set the political stage here. The world is
on fire. Europe is, certainly. The Nazis are
marching. France falls. But America, America
is sleeping. The political stance is isolationism,
not our war, but Simon and Kirby. They're two
Jewish kids from New York. They have family in
Europe. They know exactly what's happening. So
they decide to make a statement. They create
the ultimate interventionist fantasy, Captain
America. And that first cover, I mean, even if
you've never read a comic, you know that image.
Captain America punching Adolf Hitler square
in the jaw. This hits the newsstands in December
1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor. It was.
Incredibly bold. So provocative. It was a declaration
of war by two comic book creators before the
U .S. government had the courage to do the same.
And the response was explosive. It was a smash.
The first issue sold out in days. The second
issue had a print run of over a million copies.
We'll just pause on that number, a million copies.
Today, if a comic sells 100 ,000 copies, they
throw a parade. A million copies was astronomical.
They were a moving product like crazy. But this
success brings us to the first major conflict
in Kirby's career regarding money and credit.
We can call it the deal. Because Joe Simon, being
the businessman, had negotiated a percentage.
Right. Simon claimed he had an agreement with
Martin Goodman for 25 % of the profits. Now,
with a million copies selling, 25 % is a serious
amount of cash. But as the sales skyrocketed,
Simon and Kirby started to suspect that the checks
they were getting were light. They suspected
Goodman was cooking the books. It's the classic
Hollywood accounting trick. Oh, the shipping
costs were higher. Oh, the returns were high.
They felt they were being robbed. So they decided
to defect. They plotted a secret move to National
Comics, the big rival. Which we know today as
DC Comics. Now it's a Superman. They negotiated
a deal for a combined $500 a week. Now, compare
that to the $75 or $85 they were making at Timely.
It was a massive upgrade. It was buy -a -house
money. But they had to keep it a secret until
they finished their contract work at Timely.
They were working on Captain America Hashtag
10. And this is where the story gets really spicy.
It feels like a noir film. Because there's a
third figure in the office. A young kid. The
publisher's cousin. An editorial assistant who
played the flute. And fill the inkwells. Stanley.
Stanley Lieber at the time. Yeah. And Kirby was
convinced, bitterly convinced until the day he
died, that it was Stanley who found out about
their secret deal and ratted them out to Martin
Goodman. Is there any proof of that? There is
no definitive proof. It's all he said, she said.
Joe Simon actually gave Lee the benefit of the
doubt later in life. Yeah. To Kirby. Never. He
viewed it as the original betrayal. Wow. Goodman
fired them after they finished issue hashtag
10 and they moved to D .C. But that. Suspicion,
that feeling that Stan Lee was a company man
who would stab creators in the back, that seed
was planted right there in 1941. So they go to
D .C. They are the boy commandos guys now. They
create hit after hit. They are a brand name,
Simon and Kirby. Paul Levitz from D .C. compared
them to Siegel and Schuster, the creators of
Superman. They were that big. They were untouchable.
They were the kings of the newsstand. But just
as they're hitting this peak, reality comes crashing
in. Uncle Sam comes calling. World War II. It's
1943. Jack Kirby is drafted. Now, a lot of people
might assume, oh, he's a famous artist. Surely
the Army will put him in a nice office in Washington
drawing propaganda posters. That is what usually
happened with talent like that. But not for Kirby.
He went into the infantry, the 11th Infantry
Regiment. He lands on Omaha Beach in Normandy
about two and a half months after D -Day. So
he's in the thick of it. He's not in the rear.
He is in the mud. And here's the part that is
just... Chilling. A lieutenant finds out Kirby
is an artist. And instead of saying, draw me
a portrait, he says, great, you could be a scout.
Scout sounds adventurous, but in WWII infantry
terms, what does that actually mean? It means
you are the target. The scout goes ahead of the
unit into towns that might still be occupied
by Nazis. You draw reconnaissance maps. You sketch
the terrain. You spot the tank positions. You're
advancing alone or in tiny groups. It was practically
a suicide mission. He was literally risking his
life to draw maps. He wrote later that he didn't
think he would make it back. And he almost didn't.
But not from a bullet. It was the cold. The winter
of 1944. Near Metz, France. This was a brutal
winter. Kirby suffered severe frostbite on his
lower extremities. His legs turned black. It
was so bad that when he was finally evacuated
to a hospital in London, the doctors were seriously
considering amputating his legs. Just pause for
a second and imagine that alternate timeline.
Jack Kirby, the man who drew characters leaping
off skyscrapers, the man whose art is defined
by movement, losing his legs at age 27. The Marvel
Universe simply never happens. Never happens.
It was incredibly close. Thankfully he recovered.
He kept his legs. He was honorably discharged
in 1945. But he came back to a different world.
He came back to New York and the superhero craze.
It was dying. The war was over. People were tired
of fighting. They didn't want to see guys in
costumes punching things anymore. Exactly. The
cultural mood had shifted. So what does a factory
do when the market changes? You retool the machinery.
You pivot. And this is the genius of Simon and
Kirby. They weren't just artists, they were market
analysts. They looked at the magazine racks and
saw that true story confession magazines were
flying off the shelves. These were text stories
about romance, heartbreak, betrayal. And they
thought, why not do this in comics? It seems
obvious now, but nobody was doing it. They pitched
the idea of a romance comic. Young Romance. Young
Romance, hashtag one, hits the stands in 1947.
And it sold 92 % of its print run. 92 %! That's
basically a sellout. It was a phenomenon. Between
Young Romance and the spinoff Young Love, they
were selling 2 million copies a month. 2 million
a month! And here's the kicker. Because they
had learned from the Captain America debacle
with Martin Goodman, they made a very specific
deal with their new publisher, Crestwood. They
demanded a piece of the pie. A big piece. They
negotiated 50 % of the profits. 50%. That is
an incredible deal for creators even today, let
alone in 1947. It was unheard of. They were making
serious money. They bought big houses in the
suburbs of Long Island. They were raising families.
They were living the absolute American dream.
They even started their own publishing company,
Mainline Publications, in the mid -50s. They
were trying to own the means of production. But
as always seems to happen in this story. The
business side got messy. The comic industry is
volatile. In the mid -50s, the market took a
nosedive. There was a lot of moral panic about
comics claims that they caused juvenile delinquency.
Right. The Comics Code Authority. Exactly. There
were Senate hearings. Distribution companies
collapsed. Mainline folded. Crestwood tried to
stiff them on payments. Another legal battle.
And eventually, the financial pressure broke
the Simon and Kirby partnership. And this is
the low point of the story. The partnership ends.
Joe Simon goes into advertising. He leaves the
field. But Kirby. Kirby couldn't leave. He had
a wife, Roz, and kids to support. He had a mortgage.
He said, I stuck with comics. He needed the work.
So in the late 50s, humbled, he finds himself
walking back into the offices of the company
formerly known as Timely. Now it's called Atlas.
And who is running the show at Atlas? Stan Lee.
The cousin, the guy he suspected of betrayal.
The dynamic had completely flipped. In the 40s,
Kirby was the star and Lee was the assistant.
Now Lee is the editor -in -chief and Kirby is
the freelancer begging for page rates. It must
have been a humiliating moment. And the work
wasn't exactly glamorous either. This is what
fans call the monster era. Right. It was quantity
over quality. Kirby was working 12 to 14 hours
a day at home in his basement, which he called
the dungeon, cranking out stories about giant
monsters with names like Groot. The Groot we
know and love. A very early, very different version.
And names like Fin Fang Foom and Zemnu. Basically
drive -in movie stuff. Exactly. Monsters in underpants
crushing cities. But, and this is key, even though
the scripts were silly, Kirby was refining his
style. He was drawing everything. Westerns, romance,
monsters. He was keeping the factory running.
And then 1961 hits. The year everything changed.
The story goes that DC Comics was having huge
success with a new teen book called The Justice
League of America. Martin Goodman, the publisher,
still the same guy, tells Stan Lee to rip it
off, make a teen book. Stan was apparently bored
at this point, right? He was thinking of quitting
comics to write novels. He was fed up. But his
wife, Joan, told him, if you're going to quit
anyway, why not write the book you want to write?
What can they do? Fire you. So he and Kirby put
their heads together. And instead of a sleek,
perfect team of heroes like the Justice League,
they created a dysfunctional family. A fantastic
four. It was revolutionary. They didn't have
secret identities. They didn't get along. The
thing was a monster who hated his powers. Johnny
Storm was a hot -headed teenager. It felt real.
It had the emotional grounding of the romance
comics, but the visual scale of the monster books.
And visually, it was pure Kirby Unleashed. This
kicks off what we call the Marvel Age. And the
list of co -creations in this period, roughly
1961 to 1970, is just a laundry list of modern
mythology. Hulk. Thor. Iron Man. X -Men. Silver
Surfer. Black Panther. The Avengers. The Inhumans.
Doctor Doom. it is relentless for a decade jack
kirby was marvel gil kane another legendary artist
said kirby was like holy scripture for the company
he provided the breakdowns the rough layouts
for other artists to teach them how to draw the
marvel style i want to dig into the mechanics
of this collaboration because this is where the
controversy lies we see the credit Written by
Stan Lee. Art by Jack Kirby. But that doesn't
really explain how the work got done, does it?
No. And this is the source of 50 years of arguments.
It's called the Marvel method. Explain that for
us. So usually a writer writes a full script.
Panel one, Batman does this. Batman says this.
Panel two, Joker does this. And the artist draws
it. But Stan was writing too many books. He couldn't
write full scripts for everything. He was the
editor and the main writer. Exactly. So he would
have a story conference with Kirby. Sometimes
there's a long meeting. Sometimes there's a brief
phone call. OK, let's have the fantastic four
fight, Dr. Doom. And Doom has stolen the Silver
Surfer's board. That's it. That's the script.
That's the plot. Then Kirby goes home to Long
Island. He sits at his table and he draws the
entire 20 page story. But he's not just drawing.
He is pacing the story. He is deciding the choreography
of the fight. He's deciding that Dr. Doom has
a hidden laser in his gauntlet. He is deciding
the emotional beats. He's often writing notes
in the margins, suggesting dialogue. He's effectively
directing the movie. So the visual storytelling
is the writing. Exactly. Then he brings the pages
back to the office. Stan looks at them and adds
the dialogue bubbles and captions. So Kirby does
90 % of the heavy lifting, but Stan gets the
writer credit. And the writers pay. And the editors
pay. Kirby was paid a page rate for the art.
He felt with significant justification that he
was co -writing these stories with his pencil.
But the credit and the royalties didn't reflect
that. Yet, despite this frustration, the art
itself was evolving into something transcendent.
If you look at a Kirby panel from the mid -60s,
it looks like nothing else on Earth. What are
the trademarks we should look for? First, there's
the energy. He said, I had to compete with the
camera. He wanted his characters to jump off
the page. So you see foreshortening where a fist
or a foot is thrust out towards the reader, exaggerated
to look huge, creating this 3D effect. It breaks
the fourth wall physically. It does. And then
there are the dots. The Kirby crackle. You've
definitely seen this. Yeah. Those clusters of
black pseudo -fractal dots he used to represent
energy. He realized he couldn't paint glowing
light with cheap four -color printing, so he
used these dots to represent energy so intense
it was disrupting the atoms of the air. It's
a visual shorthand for cosmic power. And the
technology, the Kirby tech. The technological
sublime. He drew machines that made no engineering
sense pipes going nowhere, heavy blocky shapes,
weird squiddles. But they felt powerful. They
felt organic and alien at the same time. It wasn't
about function. It was about awe. This style
really peaks with the Galactus trilogy, doesn't
it? Fantastic Four issues, 48 through 50. This
is widely considered the finest achievement of
the Lee -Kirby partnership. They introduce Galactus,
a godlike being who eats planets. This wasn't
a bank robber, this was a whole new level. No,
this moves comics from punching bad guys to philosophical
cosmic horror. Galactus wasn't evil, he was just
above us. We were ants to him. It resonated deeply
with the college crowd in the 60s. It was metaphysical.
Kirby was even using photo collages in the backgrounds
to represent the negative zone. He was pushing
the medium as far as ink and paper could go.
But while the art was expanding to the cosmos,
the relationship with management was shrinking.
It was deteriorating rapidly. Stan Lee is becoming
the face of Marvel. He's the man. He's giving
the interviews. He's getting the fame. And Kirby
is sitting in his basement feeling erased. And
the credit issue was just gnawing at him. And
finally, in 1970, it breaks. The contract came
up for renewal. Marvel presented Kirby with a
contract that was, frankly, insulting. It prohibited
legal retaliation. It didn't give him the creator
rights or royalties he wanted. It essentially
tried to lock him down as a work -for -hire cog
in the machine. So the factory worker went on
strike? He walked. He called up Carmine Infantino,
the publisher at DC Comics, and said, I'm coming
over. It was seismic news in the industry. The
architect of Marvel was defecting to the enemy.
And he didn't just go to D .C. to draw Superman.
He went there to build a whole new mythology
from the ground up. The fourth world. This is
my personal favorite era of Kirby because it
is unfiltered. There's no Stan Lee to smooth
out the dialogue. Kirby launched four interconnected
titles. New Guys, Mr. Miracle, The Forever People,
and a very weird twist. Superman's pal, Jimmy
Olsen. That is such a strange choice. He could
have had any book. Why Jimmy Olsen? It shows
his character. He didn't want to take a job away
from another working artist. Jimmy Olsen didn't
have a stable creative team. So he took the lowest
rung on the ladder. And what did he do? He used
Jimmy Olsen to introduce Darkseid, the ultimate
fascist god of evil. That is wild. That's like
introducing Thanos in a sitcom. It is. But the
fourth world was so ambitious. It was a saga
about freedom versus control. Darkseid seeks
the anti -life equation, a mathematical proof
that free will is a lie. If he knows it, he can
enslave the universe. That is heavy stuff for
a comic book in the 70s. It was Shakespearean.
And Mr. Miracle. That feels deeply personal.
Mr. Miracle is the super escape artist. Right.
Scott Free. He escapes from traps. Many critics,
and I agree, see this as autobiographical. It's
Kirby channeling his feeling of being trapped
by Marvel, by contracts, by the industry. He's
the artist who can escape any constraint. And
speaking of personal, we have to talk about Funky
Flashman. Oh, Funky Flashman. In the pages of
Mr. Miracle, Kirby introduced a character named
Funky Flashman. He's a charlatan. He lives in
a decaying mansion, relying on the glory of a
boy commando he used to know. He wears a bad
toupee. He speaks in grand, empty alliterations.
It's Stan Lee. It is a brutal, savage caricature.
Kirby draws him as a coward who exploits others.
It shows just how deep the hurt went. He viewed
Lee as someone who cashed in on the work of others.
It's funny, but it's also heartbreaking. So The
Fourth World is a creative masterpiece, but was
it a commercial hit? Not at the time. It was
dense. It was weird. The dialogue was idiosyncratic.
Readers were confused. And DC canceled the books
one by one. That must have been devastating.
It was. But here is the vindication. The characters
stuck. Darkseid, Orion, Mr. Miracle. They became
the bedrock of the DC Universe's cosmic side.
Just like he built Marvel, he built the modern
mythology of DC. But because the books were canceled,
he was kind of adrift again. And in a twist that
feels inevitable, he goes back to Marvel. In
1976, Stan Lee announces it at a convention.
The King is back. But it wasn't a happy reunion.
Kirby came back on the condition that he write
and edit his own books. He didn't want to collaborate
with Lee. He wanted autonomy. And he produced
some wild stuff. The Eternals. The Eternals,
giants, space gods. Again, huge scope. Devil
Dinosaur, a T -Rex, and a cave boy. Machine Man.
But the atmosphere at Marvel was toxic for him.
The younger editors, the new generation, they
didn't get him. They thought his dialogue was
old -fashioned. They started changing his art
without telling him. redrawing faces. That is
the ultimate insult to an artist. It drove him
away again. By 1978, he left comics for the animation
industry. He went to Hanna -Barbera and Ruby
Spears. And this is where he works on things
like Thundar the Barbarian. Which looks exactly
like a Kirby comic. And honestly, he loved it.
The pay was better, the benefits were better,
health insurance, and the people treated him
like a legend. He was happier there. Now we have
to touch on one of the strangest stories in the
source material. It sounds like an urban legend,
but it's historical fact. The Argo connection.
This is unbelievable. In 1979, Kirby was hired
to draw concept art for a proposed theme park
called Science Fiction Land and a movie adaptation
of Lord of Light. He drew these massive psychedelic
alien cities. The project fell apart and the
art went into a drawer. Enter the CIA. The CIA
needed a cover story to rescue six American diplomats
who were hiding in Iran during the hostage crisis.
They decided to pretend they were a film crew
scouting locations for a massive sci -fi blockbuster.
They needed art to sell the lie. So they used
Kirby's drawings? They grabbed Kirby's concept
art, slapped a new title on it, Argo, and flew
to Tehran. They showed these drawings to the
Iranian officials, and the drawings were so convincing,
so grand, that the Iranians bought it. They said,
yes, this looks like a big American movie. So
Jack Kirby's imagination literally saved lives.
Indirectly, yes. It's a testament to how convincing
his worlds were. Even the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard looked at them and believed a world like
that could exist. That is incredible. But while
his art was saving hostages abroad, he was fighting
a war at home, the battle for his original art.
This is the dark chapter that galvanized the
industry. In the 1980s, copyright laws and industry
standards changed. Publishers started returning
original art pages to artists. Now, you have
to understand, these pages were becoming valuable
on the collector market. We're talking thousands
of dollars a page. And Marvel had thousands of
Kirby's pages. Estimates are around 13 ,000 pages,
and Marvel... dragged its feet. They were holding
the pages hostage. Defective blackmail. In 1985,
Marvel finally made an offer. They would return
88 pages. 88 out of 13 ,000. Less than 1%. And
there was a catch. He could only have the 88
pages if he signed a document affirming that
his work was work for hire and signing away all
future royalties and copyright claims. That is
incredibly predatory. Kirby was furious. He refused
to sign. He went public. He called them thugs.
And for the first time, the entire comic book
industry united. Artists from D .C., independent
creators, fans, everyone rallied around Kirby.
It was a PR nightmare for Marvel. Give the king
his art back. Exactly. It took years of pressure,
but eventually Marvel settled. They returned
about 2 ,100 pages. Still a fraction of his output,
but a victory nonetheless. And more importantly,
it shone a spotlight on creator rights. It set
the stage for the modern era where creators actually
own their ideas. Absolutely. In his later years,
Kirby worked with Pacific Comics on Captain Victory.
This was an early deal where the creator owned
the character. He helped break the monopoly of
the work -for -hire system. He showed that you
didn't have to be a serf on the factory floor.
You could own the factory. It's poetic, isn't
it? The guy who started with a factory mentality
spent his last years fighting to prove he wasn't
just a machine. And sadly, he passed away in
1994. of heart failure. He was 76. He died with
a pencil in his hand, metaphorically speaking.
But the legacy, I mean, we started this by talking
about the movies. The financial impact is in
the billions. Disney named him a Disney legend
in 2017. His family eventually settled with Marvel
and Disney for a substantial sum. And now if
you watch the movies, you see his name in the
credits. But beyond the money, it's the sheer
scope of the imagination. There is that beautiful
image from a Fantastic Four comic, not drawn
by Kirby, but by Mike Waringo, that really sums
it up. Oh, I love that issue. It's a story where
the Fantastic Four die and go to heaven. They
make their way to the creator's office. They
open the door, and God is sitting at a drawing
board. He turns around. It's Jack Kirby. Pencil
in hand, cigar in mouth. That gives me chills.
It's the perfect tribute. It is. He is the creator
with a capital C for that universe. He built
it. So as we wrap up this deep dive, what is
the big takeaway? What should we be thinking
about when we see the next Marvel movie or pick
up a graphic novel? I think we should think about
the difference between cinematic and static.
Kirby always said he was competing with the camera.
He tried to make static images move. Now we have
CGI cameras that can do anything. We've realized
his vision on screen. But I want to leave you
with a question. Does a $200 million movie frame
have the same raw power as a Jack Kirby splash
page drawn on a kitchen table in Long Island?
That is a great question. I would argue that
sometimes the drawing is still more powerful
because the drawing requires the reader to participate.
You have to connect the blows. You have to imagine
the motion. The movie just shows it to you. Kirby
made you a co -creator in the myth. He invited
us into the factory to build the dream with him.
Jack Kirby, the king. Thank you for walking us
through this incredible life. Always a pleasure.
Long live the king. And thank you for listening.
We'll see you on the next deep dive.