Ronin Ro - Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution

TALESTO ASTONISH

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Gangsta

Have Gun Will Travel

Street Sweeper

Bad Boy

TALES TO

ASTONISH

JACK KIRBY, STAN LEE, AND THE

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK REVOLUTION

RONIN RO

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2004 by Ronin Ro

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Ro, Ronin.

Tales to astonish : Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American comic book revolution / Ronin Ro1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-892-4

1. Kirby, Jack. 2. CartoonistsUnited StatesBiography.

3. Lee, Stan. I. Title.

PN6727.K57Z88 2004

741.5'092dc22

2003020906

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004 This paperback edition published in 2005

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire, Scotland

Printed in the United States of America

by Quebecor World Fairfield

For Stan and Jack

Content

J acob Kurtzberg was tired of being poor.

Born on Essex Street in Manhattan, on August 25, 1917, he lived in a tiny tenement apartment on Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side. His father, Benjamin, worked as a tailor to make the $12 rent, while his mother, Rosemary, worked as a seamstress or in a bakery. Money was always tight.

Most afternoons, he'd walk to Forty-second Street, where the Daily News, the Journal, and various Hearst newspapers had their offices, and run errands for reporters. On Saturdays he'd head to the cinema, pay a dime, and thrill to gangster movies, serials, comedies, and science fiction. By now, a few of his neighbors, including John Garfield, were making it big in Hollywood, and James Cagney was in the middle of a winning streak. Jacob privately dreamed of moving out west to become an actor.

When the movies were over, he returned to the neighborhood and to feeling ashamed of his hand-me-down turtleneck sweaters and knickers.

It was a difficult time to be a twelve-year-old boy. Everywhere, kids were forming gangs. Kids on Suffolk Street became the Suffolk Street Gang and fought the Norfolk Street Gang. Then they fought Irish and black gangs. Some of his peers started running with the well-dressed mobsters hanging around the neighborhood. If he couldn't become an actor, Jacob figured, he'd do this, too, or become a crooked politician, like the ones he saw holding conferences and spending money in neighborhood restaurants.

But thoughts of the future had to wait. For now, he had to maintain his reputation and look out for his brother, David. Their mother wanted David to wear nice clothes, but velvet pants, a lace collar, and shoulder-length curly blond hair (at the height of the Depression) had made the kid a perpetual target. Five years his junior and over six feet tall, David was stocky and tough, but no match for the street-hardened gangsters stepping up to confront him. David did what he could when the gangs attacked, but sometimes Jacob would leave school, see his brother under a pile of opponents, and leap at them with both fists swinging. "I really had to whale into 'em, and I did," he said later. "And it was a common everyday occurrence. Fighting became second nature. I began to like it."

When he wasn't fighting - a rare moment; at Hebrew school he knocked out a kid while jostling to get a better window view of an airplane passing overhead - he continued spending hard-earned dimes on The Time Machine or comedies that starred Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or the Marx Brothers (whom he'd enjoyed from before they hit it big, when they took the stage at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street to perform vaudeville routines). He told his mother he wanted to pursue a career in the movies, but she said, "No, you can't go to California."

He kept seeing gangs fight and gangsters get shot in the corner candy store. He tried to find a place to play ball, dodged ice wagons and pushcarts and nomadic peddlers, and battled it out with Irish gangs that wandered over from the East Side waterfront wielding rocks, glass bottles, and clubs.

But one rainy afternoon, everything changed. Jacob noticed a pulp magazine floating toward a sewer in the gutter. "So I pick up this pulp magazine and it's Wonder Stories and it's got a rocket ship on the cover and I'd never seen a rocket ship." At home, he tucked it under his pillow so no one would know he was reading it. Wonder Stories led him to newspaper strips like Barney Google and Prince Valiant. He liked that the pages were large and colorful. "And Prince Valiant - it was astonishing to see this beautiful illustration in the newspaper, and it was so different from the ordinary comics."

Soon he was writing his own stories. And though his dream of studying art at Pratt ended when his father lost his job, he kept teaching himself how to draw, studying Milton Caniff's and Hal Foster's comic strips while trying to make his own heroes even more powerful. When he watched movies now, it was to learn how directors told stories and to apply these techniques to his work.

By 1936, he wanted to create his own newspaper strip. Publishers were only beginning to slap strips together into monthly magazine titles, but creating an enduring strip, he felt, would ensure a stable income. The nineteen-year-old aspiring artist landed a job at Lincoln Newspaper Features and drew editorials ("Your Health Comes First") and forgettable daily strips under pseudonyms. "I wanted to be an all-around American," he explained. His pen names confused his parents, but he kept using them. "I felt if you wanted to have a great name, it would be Farnsworth, right? Or Stillweather. I felt Jack Kirby was close to my real name."

He left Lincoln for an assistant's job at Max Fleischer's animation studio. Here, he sat at a long table and drew what were known as the in-between steps in a cartoon. For the character Popeye to be seen taking a step, he had to create six drawings - his foot rising, moving through the air, and landing on the ground again. He drew these pictures, then passed them over to the next artist seated at the long table. This artist would then draw the character's next step.

Although the Fleischer studio paid decently, Jacob came increasingly to view this job with disdain - it struck him as being too much like his father's job in a factory. Just as he decided he wanted to create on his own properties, he began to see the earliest comic books hanging from newsstands.

Jerry Siegel (with artist Joe Schuster) had sent comic strip proposals to various publishers. "He was looking for work," says Will Eisner, who owned one of the biggest comic packaging shops in town. "He had two features called Spy something and another thing called Superman. And I wrote back a letter to him when he was in Cleveland. I thought they weren't ready for prime time, that they should stay in Cleveland another year." They didn't, and Superman's immediate success birthed an industry. When DC published June 1938's