Or, What I’m Doing Now that My Summer Vacation is Over
Jack Kirby (b. Jacob Kurtzberg, 1917-1994) would be 108 years old today.
Born and raised on New York’s Lower East Side, Jacob, or Jakie, or (later) Jack or Kirby, would live through poverty, eke out a living by writing and drawing, lift himself and his family into a precarious middle-class existence, one he always had to fight for, and, over time, reshape US comic books (and pop culture generally) with his profuse, unstinting, freewheeling imagination. Next to my brother Scott, Kirby has probably influenced my reading and writing life, hence my whole outlook, more than any other creator. I’ve had, and I have, other go-to artists and cultural heroes, but Kirby hit me early on, heavily, seriously, knocking me sideways in the best way. I keep trying to write my way to a better understanding of why Kirby, basically, set me afire, but, well, it’s an ongoing effort. Of course.
My introductory comics studies course at CSU Northridge, Comics & Graphic Novels (a bad name, and I’m to blame for it), is focusing on Kirby this semester. That’s a focus my classes haven’t had since 2015. Why again now? Mainly because of the Skirball’s splendid exhibition, Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity, which I’ve written about here before and which my students are required to visit. That exhibit, curated by Patrick Reed and Ben Saunders, is open until March 1 next year, and I’m determined to take classes to it. When you’ve got that kind of resource in town, that big and historic a show, not using would be a terrible waste. So, we’re going there, and that means I’ve had to redesign my course yet again! Glad to do it.
For a few years now, I’ve taught Comics & Graphic Novels as a frankly presentist course focusing on currently popular genres in US comics publishing: graphic novels, graphic memoirs, webcomics (increasingly, webtoons), and translated manga, often alongside a token direct-market comic book serial and some minicomix that I loan out. While reading in those genres, we study comics form and also do some experiments in cartooning, culminating in, usually, a final, comics-making creative project. In the past, oh, seven to eight years the number of required books in the course has dropped from a half dozen or more to, sometimes, just three, maybe four. I’ve developed a habit of teaching about key genres in terms of recent examples, while backfilling a bit with lecture to acknowledge certain canonical heavyweights (so, for example, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do became a way to talk about Green, Spiegelman, Bechdel, and the autographics tradition). Along the way, lectures about history have actually become fewer, though more targeted.
But now, it’s back to Kirby again, with a vengeance, and therefore back to history. It’s odd but true to say that, despite my love of Kirby, he hasn’t played a very obvious role in my teaching life, maybe because the one class on comics that I get to teach regularly is taxed with covering a lot of things. I mean, I taught an X-Men course this past spring, and of course Kirby figured there, hugely, at the outset, but that wasn’t an auteurist course. And sometimes I teach a whole semester without talking about Kirby much.
The question that the Heroes and Humanity show posed to me was, is, How do I reconcile my usual present-day focus with this grand opportunity to teach Kirby, and through him, comic book history?
So here’s what we’re doing, or what I expect we’ll be doing, over the next roughly fifteen to sixteen weeks:
We started two days ago with some drawing and icebreaking exercises, a few introductory words about that most recalcitrant of subjects, comics (what the hell are they, anyway?), and a very brief intro to Kirby.
Today, Kirby’s birthday, my students will share their homework, that is, their versions of Kirby’s two-page comic, “Hot Box” (Foxhole #2, 1954), which I gave to them sans text and asked them to fill in with their own words. This will lead to some discussion of text anchoring image (in Roland Barthes’ sense) and the multimodal nature of comic art. I also hope we have time to read “Meet Captain America” (Captain America Comics #1, March 1941). Next week we’ll be reading Kirby’s 1968 recreation of Cap’s origin story, “The Hero That Was” (Captain America #109, Dec. 1968). We’ll also be reading Kirby’s beautiful, haunting “Street Code” (created in 1983, published in 1990 in Argosy #2).
Over the next five weeks or so, we’ll read wartime and postwar Simon & Kirby, including some kid gang and romance classics, dive into Tom Scioli’s graphic biography of Kirby, talk about the early history of comic books in general, right up to the 1950s anti-comics eruption and industry implosion, and get ready to absorb the Skirball show.
After we see the show, we’ll get to the Marvel Sixties, covered very selectively over two to three weeks (with, for example, Ben Saunders’ splendid Fantastic Four volume in the Penguin Classics series), and then we’ll spend a couple of weeks talking about the Fourth World, Kirby’s bold 1970s experiment and, from my POV, the peak of his work in serial comic books. Around that time, students will probably be working on their Visual Analyses: side-by-side studies of pages from Kirby comics and other comics of their choosing.
In the back half of the term, in roughly the last six weeks, we’ll read some contemporary artists who take Kirby’s influence in unexpected, independent directions. Only one of our readings will actually be a corporate franchise comic, Ngozi Ukazu’s intriguing take on Kirby’s Barda (DC). Others will include work by Hugo Canuto (Tales of the Orishas), Charles Glaubitz (Starseeds, and more), and Lale Westvind (Grip). I’m determined not to focus on DC and Marvel IP at the expense of other themes. By the end of term, students will be crafting Final Projects: either research projects based on works encountered at the Skirball, or comics projects reflecting on their entire experience in the course.
This is all an experiment, of course: a way of connecting the dots between the comic books of Kirby’s multiple eras and comics of today. I’m excited to see how it plays out!
It’s fitting that Jack Kirby has given me new ways to converse with my students. Happy Birthday and unending thanks to the artist whose influence ushered me into the work I do and who continues to delight, enthrall, confound, and transport.
PS. The Kirby Museum is once again hosting a walking tour of Kirby’s Lower East Side, this very day. This is a great way to think about the roots of Kirby, and where so much of our comics iconography and pop culture have come from. Check it out: 6:30 pm Eastern on the SE corner of Essex and Delancey, and then ending up at the original location of the Boys Brotherhood Republic, 90 East 3rd St. Would that I could be there in person. ❤
Kirby Studies 