Book Review: According to Jack Kirby by Michael Hill

"According to Jack Kirby: Insights drawn from interviews with comics' greatest creator"
by Michael Hill

Lulu Books

2021

ISBN 9781667133072

available here

Review by BK Munn

This fascinating new book by Canadian comics scholar Michael Hill documents one of the greatest art crimes of the 20th Century, the billion dollar theft of the Marvel Comics characters, told from the point of view of the artist who created them, Jack Kirby. Many people are familiar with the corporate fiction recounted to this day by Marvel and its parent company Disney, and parroted in every news media article, of how the genius writer Stan Lee dreamed up his super hero universe in the 1960s and spun it into a vast empire of toys, movies, and video games, making Stan Lee a millionaire and leading to his many cameos in the beloved Marvel films. The real story is quite different, and it's the story of how middle-aged cartoonist Jack Kirby, desperate for work because his own comics company had just gone out of business and he had been blacklisted from working at DC Comics (publisher of Superman and Batman), came to work for Stan Lee at the tiny little company that would become Marvel. 

Stan Lee, the cousin of the publisher, had started as an office boy 20 years earlier and now was the sole employee of his cousin's comics company. Despite a downturn in the business, every month he was still responsible for getting a handful of comic books to print, hiring different writers and artists to create the various humour and cowboy stories he published. Stan even wrote a couple comics each month himself, specializing in "dumb blonde" humour titles like "Millie the Model." Jack Kirby was a seasoned pro at this point, with a legendary and varied resume. The co-creator of Captain America and dozens of other super hero, science fiction and adventure titles, he had also invented the entire genre of romance comics before falling on hard times. Kirby pitched a line of superhero comics to Stan, drawing presentation boards of characters, and then returned to his home studio to plot, write and draw the comics. Once a week he'd drop his pencilled pages off at the office and Stan would revise his dialogue, adding captions and word balloons in the jokey, wisecracking, chummy style that would come to be his hallmark, before sending the pages off to be prepared for printing. Because he added the revised dialogue on top of Kirby's already completed stories, and because he occasionally would make suggestions about the direction of the series and ask for art revisions, Stan credited himself as "Writer" and gave himself a paycheque for every comic Kirby turned in, in addition to his salary as editor. Kirby meanwhile was credited only as "Artist" and was paid by the page as a freelancer with no benefits or royalties. This was the working relationship that led to Kirby's creation of The Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, etc. (The same "division of labour" was applied when cartoonist Steve Ditko worked on Spider-Man, based originally on another Kirby proposal, and Dr. Strange.) With the rising popularity of the characters, Stan Lee became the voice of Marvel Comics, writing advertising copy and editorials every month about this fun clubhouse of happy artists (most of whom worked from home and never met each other) he rode herd on, churning out the interconnected fantasy tales that the fans loved.

By the end of the 1960s, Ditko and Kirby had finally quit and Stan had to hire a new batch of writers and artists to continue the adventures of their characters. At the same time, Marvel was sold to a bigger company and the new bosses were anxious to secure their ownership of this now valuable intellectual property. Stan kept his job by claiming he was the sole creator of all the characters, signed a document and gave interviews to that effect, and even started writing books recounting his mythic creation stories ("The Origin of Marvel Comics" et al), even though after Kirby left the company Stan never "created" another memorable comic or character again, while Kirby went on to create hundreds more for different publishers.

Michael Hill has written this book as a corrective to the corporate propaganda that fans and journalists alike still repeat every day. He has done this by extensively quoting the interviews Kirby himself gave starting in the early 1960s and by meticulously poking logical holes in every building block of the ridiculous legal fantasy of Stan Lee as the creative force behind the Marvel revolution. Of course, these days you'll see Jack Kirby gets credited as co-creator in some of the movies and comics, in part because his family sued Disney after Kirby died and Disney settled with them before the case got to The Supreme Court, but the myth of loveable Stan Lee is a hard one to give up, especially for fans raised on a diet of the comics and the blockbuster "Marvel Cinematic Universe," but Hill's book goes a long way towards setting the record straight.

Dick Siegel,1955-2018

by BK Munn

The writer and cartoonist Dick Siegel died June 22 in Manhattan after a short illness.

Richard "Dick" Siegel was born May 27, 1955 in Los Angeles and attended Parsons School of Design in New York. A lifelong fan of comics and science fiction, some of his earliest work was as a writer and designer of several books packaged by Push Pin Studios. These include Alien Creatures and Fantastic Planets, illustrated with stills and posters from classic science fiction films and tv shows. He wrote and drew a comic strip parodying classic film called "The 4:30 Movie" for The SoHo Weekly News and was the author of two satirical works of fiction. He was for many years a chief contributing writer to the Weekly World News, where he also created the comics features Spy Cat (with artist Ernie Colon) and Matthew Daemon, Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals (with artist Mike Collins). Siegel had an extensive low-budget filmography as an indy cinematographer and director, produced and directed interviews for The National Enquirer, and wrote the screenplay for Shadow: Dead Riot, among others. He was the creator of the webseries, Smash Moron, Intergalactic Dolt.

Besides freelance work for a number of outlets as a journalist, humour writer, and pop culture historian, Siegel worked as a senior writer and the online editor for The National Enquirer from 2008 until 2015. 

For many years a resident of Staten Island, Siegel is survived by two sisters.

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A 2010 GQ profile of the magazine's staff, from around the time the Enquirer was seriously being considered for a Pulitzer for its coverage of the John Edwards political scandal, focused on Siegel and his boss Barry Levine, and establishes Siegel's comic book fan bona fides:

Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with colored comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)

"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."

He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."

But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.

"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"

"Heroes and villains, in primary colors. That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."

Investigating Comic Books in Canada: Maclean's Magazine, 1948

I finally picked up a physical copy of this Maclean's Magazine article from 1948. The 5-page article "What About the Comics?" by Sidney Katz appeared in the December 1st issue and for its time was a quite thorough look at the moral panic over so-called "crime comics". For the article, Katz corresponded with the New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of the anti-comics diatribe Seduction of the Innocent, and quotes an armload of other thinkers on early childhood education including Dr. Spock. The article also touches on the crusade to have the sale of crime comics criminalized, and looks at the use of religious and educational comics in the classroom, mentioning many of the then-popular U.S. comic book titles and features along the way. The article is one of the earliest published in the international "mainstream" media to treat with this subject, and comes across as fairly balanced (Katz went on to specialize in award-winning journalism with a focus on psychology and mental illness). The article is well-documented and often-cited in the study of anti-comics literature, and is even still available on the Maclean's site to subscribers, but it's nice to have my own original copy. The best part is the staged photo of the kids reading the comics in front of a Maclean's newsstand. I like to imagine this was photographed in the lobby of the Maclean's building at 481 University Ave in Toronto, perhaps using the well-dressed children of the photographer. The sale of crime comics was criminalized in Canada in 1949 as a result of The Fulton Bill.

Hardboiled Comics Critics

"Two privates appeared from nowhere, pale in their uniforms like young ghosts trapped by reality. I got out and followed them across Main and into a magazine shop near the corner. The unlit neon sign of Tom's Cafe was almost directly across the street. Beer on Tap. Steam Beer. Try Our Spaghetti Special. The soldiers were inspecting a rack of comic books with the air of connoisseurs. They selected half a dozen each, paid for them and left. 'Milk sops,' the clerk said. He was a gray-headed man with smeared spectacles. 'They draft them in didees these days. Cradle to grave in one jump. '" 
--Ross Macdonald, The Ivory Grin, 1952.