Smoldering.

Yeah, it has been that kind of day.

Watch the fuck out.

The Truth

The multi-billion dollar industry that we now know as "the Marvel Universe" was mainly created by one man.

Jack Kirby created it.

Jack Kirby wrote it.

Jack Kirby illustrated it.

He had no "co-creator". Just a meddling editor who lied in his position as company shill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Kirby's comic book alter ego, Ben Grimm.

The Creator: Jack Kirby.

Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott!

When Jack Kirby was working on THE FANTASTIC FOUR he was teamed with a number of embellishers (also known as inkers). Just about all of these men were very talented and dedicated, but sometimes the inking styles contrasted with Kirby's pencils and layouts and the results were not what they should have been. In the case of some of the guys who worked with him on other titles, they cut corners to produce more work in less time and the results of those efforts were almost criminal.

But, by and large, Kirby had a lot of great collaborators when he did FANTASTIC FOUR. I always very much enjoyed seeing Steve Ditko ink Kirby's art, but this was a rare teaming. Dick Ayers generally was quite good, but worked with Kirby less and less as the years passed. Everyone has their favorite inker over Kirby's pencils, and I am no exception.

My favorite inker for Kirby was Joe Sinnott. His inks were very crisp and exacting and he tended to make the reader more aware than most of the other collaborators on just how skilled Jack Kirby really was. And nobody...NOBODY...understood the character of Ben Grimm (aka "the Thing") better than Joe Sinnott. He brought the brutish hero into perfect clarity like no other inker who had preceded him. In fact, even after Kirby abandoned his creations at Marvel, Sinnott continued to carry that understanding of how to ink those characters over the pencils of artist/writers who followed in Kirby's massive wake.

So here's to my favorite Kirby inker, Joe Sinnott!

This image is, to me, one of the best illustrations I ever saw of Ben Grimm.

 

A great battle issue by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott.

An early appearance of The Inhumans, another Kirby creation!

I've always felt that Ben Grimm was Kirby's romanticized version of himself. That's why Grimm seemed to dominate the title, and why the character was so rich and fully realized that he was the book's fan favorite.

Jack and Joe!!

Big Trouble for the FF!

One story that Kirby used quite a lot during his time on the Fantastic Four was of having Ben Grimm go rogue and actually coming to blows with the rest of the team. Sometimes he was being emotionally manipulated. Sometimes he was just pissed off. And sometimes the reason was mind control. The latter was the plot device of choice for Kirby in most of these stories.

Thus it was during the 41-43 story arc, one that I quite enjoyed as a kid and which stands up today. Kirby had, by this time, begun to use some rather sophisticated themes in his writing, diverging from the purely children's yarns he had utilized in the very earliest incarnations of the title.

My copies of FF 41 through 43. Ben goes rogue! The FF were in big trouble!

Kirby Does the Human Torch

The inclusion of the character the Human Torch into the Silver Age Marvel Universe was done to keep dibs on the name and iconography connected to that name. The character was, of course, created wholly by Carl Burgos and claimed by Martin Goodman as spoils of his company, which published the character. Along with the Sub-Mariner, the two are actually the oldest superheroes in the Marvel pantheon (circa 1939). And both were taken from their creators (Burgos in the case of the Torch, and Bill Everett in the case of Namor, the Sub-Mariner).

Later in his life, Burgos tried to present a legal challenge to Marvel and reclaim his intellectual property, but he was far too poor to mount an effective effort and the suit wilted on the vine, abandoned. This is usually the way of things when regular folk try to struggle against corporate power. The one who can throw the most money at the courts wins by default.

While Goodman was not as hands-on as some publishers, he did send down his wishes through his proxy, Stan Lee. You can tell from the publishing end of things that he must have wanted the Human Torch as an ongoing character to protect what may have been a problematic copyright. To that end, the Torch was, for several years, featured prominently in his own adventures as the cover feature every month in Strange Tales. He was also frequently popping up in stories that featured the Amazing Spider-Man. It was obvious that they were trying to create a star, forcing the matter and trying to make the readers adore a character who was actually just a co-star, at best.

Of all of the characters that Kirby wrote on a regular basis, the Torch always seemed to me to be the weakest of them all. I can almost hear the editor constantly nagging. "Make him a teenager. Make him hip. Make him all Rebel-Without-A-Cause. Make him like hot rods. Make him go through girlfriends." Blah blah blah. I think Kirby obviously tried to comply, but to no real success.

The only time the character seemed to click with readers was as part of a kind of comedy team, serving as the hot-head foil for the otherwise stoic Ben Grimm. In the sometimes funny, sometimes pathetic, sometimes heart-warming exchanges between the two, the character worked well. But outside of that combination, the fans just didn't seem to give a damn about the Human Torch.

I think the last time Kirby tried to consciously push the matter and to force the readers to embrace the Human Torch as an upper echelon character for Marvel was during the period when this cover appeared, for FANTASTIC FOUR #54. It's almost as if Kirby was saying, 'Okay, guys. Here it is. I'm going to give it one last shot.' And he tried. And he failed. The Torch was just not first flight material in the Silver Age.

My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #54.

Kirby, Kirby, and Kirby.

Soon, I'm going to write about the comic whose cover is pictured here. It was the final chapter of a four-part series in FANTASTIC FOUR. It was all Kirby. It was classic Kirby. Everything that Kirby was about is tied up in this neat and fantastic story.

However, I'm not going to write about the books and story arc in any detail, because I still need to add some of the issues in that arc to my collection. To do the essay now I'd be going on pure recollection, and I want to read it all fresh, in the original format that Kirby intended it to be read.

Give me a few weeks.

FANTASTIC FOUR #93. The last part of the "Slave" story arc that Kirby plotted, wrote, and illustrated. It's without doubt my absolute favorite Jack Kirby story. I loved everything about it when I was a kid, and it holds up today and is as powerful as it was when first published. Kirby all the way. No co-creator. Just Jack Kirby writing and penciling, Frank Giacoia inking, Artie Simek lettering, and the publisher's nephew editing.

The World's Greatest Comic Magazine! By Jack Kirby!

Now that I've pretty much completed my collection of Steve Ditko's The Amazing Spider-Man, I'm going to focus my attention on Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four. I have a long way to go on this one, since Kirby wrote and illustrated a tad over 100 issues of FF. He created it in 1961 and wrote and penciled every single issue until #101, and one more issue after that. The Fantastic Four was his first stab at creating a superhero team for the nascent Marvel Comics. Later, he would create the Avengers and the X-Men, but that first time out of the gate he concocted the FF.

It is true that Kirby did not create the Human Torch. The teenaged hothead alter-ego of Johnny Storm was his, but the super powered hero was the brainchild of Carl Burgos. But, at that time, Martin Goodman wanted to exercise his claim on the character and so it's been said that he sent down word (through his nephew, the editor) that Kirby should include a character with the name "Human Torch". This Kirby did, teaming him with the learned Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic--akin to Plastic Man in abilities), Susan Storm (brother to Johnny Storm whose powers would cause her to be named the Invisible Girl), and Benjamin J. Grimm (also known as the Thing).

Kirby laid out a unique superhero team with the Fantastic Four. These guys were no Justice League of America. They were combative and argumentative and were alive with personal problems and faults. This was something new, and it was all Kirby.

I'm going to have a good time filling in the gaps in my collection.

America was really changing around Kirby as he wrote the stories for his comics. This tale was one of the last he would pen in his old style of writing. He was beginning to open up to the idea of the anti-hero and the outsider, and to the theme of revolution. Just around the corner was a rising tide that Kirby would incorporate into his Marvel Universe.

Kirby was hitting his stride as a power to be reckoned with in modern comics. Here he was introducing new characters at a tremendous pace. Alone, he was creating the basis for a company that became the powerhouse for the entire comic book industry. Nobody could compare to Kirby for sheer imaginative reach and his explosion of ingenuity and energy. The Inhumans would become an integral part of the Fantastic Four series for decades to come.

Ben Grimm

The older I get, the more I revert to my childhood. Old comics, hikes, backpacking trips, monster movies, and plastic model kits.
This is one I've been hunting for a while. It's not old...but I dithered about getting one when they were in production and in every hobby shop. Now they're out of production and I've been having fits getting my hands on one. Finally, I was able to buy one for $7.00 on Ebay.


It's for ages 5 and up. That includes me. It's a snap-together kit, so I'm going to put it together this weekend.

Ben Grimm is one of the more fascinating characters that Jack Kirby created. He was, in many ways, a romantic version of Jack himself. I recall seeing an illustration that Kirby did of Ben Grimm dressed in a tallit prayer shawl. It did not surprise me, as I'd always thought of Ben Grimm as being a Jew. Why? I can't say, exactly. Maybe it's just because I knew the character was near and dear to Kirby's heart and that Kirby was a Jew. It just seemed to fit.

Another thing about him is that I never referred to him as "the Thing", which was his superhero moniker. To me, he was more human than that, and so even when I was a kid I called him Ben Grimm. He was somehow more real to me than just your regular comic book character.


Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created the Marvel Universe. Anyone else who says it was other than that is a liar or a fool.