How Jack Kirby Made His Mark on Marvel

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Please welcome the Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four First Steps comes out on July 25th. Herbie, how's that sauce looking? Okay. That is fantastic. And it has been a long time coming.

The movie rights to the Fantastic Four used to be owned by 20th Century Fox. When Disney absorbed 20th Century Fox, Marvel was finally able to bring the Fantastic Four into the MCU. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been very... uneven for the past few years. They squandered a lot of goodwill among the fans, including me. So the studio is betting on the Fantastic Four. They're going to move them front and center.

in the next phase of the MCU. I am cautiously optimistic about this new film for one big reason. They're introducing the Fantastic Four in an alternate universe, where it's basically the 1960s, except with more advanced technology. Why the 60s? The Fantastic Four has a special place in the history of Marvel Comics. The comic book launched in 1961, before Spider-Man, the Avengers, or the X-Men.

They're known as Marvel's first family. And when I was a kid, I loved Fantastic Four comics. I remember in the 1970s going to Newbury Comics in Boston. and picking up original issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from the 60s. Back then, they were considered cheap old comics.

If I only had the foresight to keep them, they would be worth so much right now. I looked it up on eBay. At that age, I also didn't know who Jack Kirby was. I just knew that there was somebody drawing Marvel Comics whose style I really liked.

In 2018, I did an episode about Kirby. I want to replay it for you, but I've also revised it with new material and updates on what's happening with some of the intellectual property that he developed. The Fantastic Four was particularly important to Kirby because he felt a close kinship with Ben Grimm, the streetwise member of the Fantastic Four who became the rock monster known as The Thing.

Just like Kirby, Ben Grimm grew up in the Lower East Side, on a fictional street called Yancey Street, which is a stand-in for Delancey Street, where Kirby grew up. In fact, New York City just put up two commemorative signs on that street corner. sang Yancey Street and Jack Kirby Way. Mark Evanier worked as an assistant to Jack Kirby in the 1970s.

One topic you heard when you were around Jack was World War II stories. Number two was about his days as a street fighter kid in the Lower East Side. He had tons of stories about them. And of course, a lot of them turned up. in the Fantastic Four when Ben Grimm was fighting a thing called the Yancey Street Gang. The difference, of course, is that Ben Grimm was a big, hulking monster, and Jack was a little 5'4", shrimpy guy who had to fight with his fists a lot.

That poverty environment never left Jack. It never left most of those guys. It never left my father, remembering how tough they had it when they were 11. A very powerful thing among... Jewish kids of that era was, I have to provide for my family. I have to bring money home. My father's salary does not meet our needs, so I have to go out and make $3 this week. In fact...

Jack Kirby's granddaughter has stated that her grandfather named the character Ben because that was his father's name. The actor playing Ben Grimm in the new film, Eben Moss Bacharach, has said that he used that biographical material. to influence his performance. And here is Kirby himself in a 1990 interview. Now Ben Grimm talks and acts just like I do. Ben Grimm is a natural guy.

He certainly does the things that I wish that I could do. He can tear an ash can up like we do paper, you know. And he can rescue people in manners that we can't. He can rip off the side of a building. and maybe get the tenants out because it's going to explode. Ben Grimm can do it. Other people, it would take many, many hours.

So, let's look back at an artist that many comic book fans believe is truly responsible for creating characters that have dominated the MCU and beyond, even if he didn't always get enough credit or compensation. This is the sound of a happy kitchen in my apartment. Oh, is that the steak sizzling? Yeah, this is going to be delicious. We recently got a delivery from ButcherBox, so we invited a friend over.

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so they know we sent you. In the early days of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee was kind of like an editor. who talked with the artists about what kind of stories and characters they were going to create. Then the artists would sit at their desks, plot out the narrative, figure out the emotional beats, and draw the comics, sometimes inventing characters that Stan had never seen.

until the artist gave him the drawings. For instance, the villain in the new Fantastic Four film is a character that Kirby created called Galactus. The costume design in the movie looks like it's going to be very faithful to Kirby's designs. Arlen Schumer is an illustrator and comic book historian. The urban legend goes that sometime in 1965, Stan Lee says to Jack Kirby, maybe in a phone call, Hey Jack.

have the FF fight a really big villain next month. He goes home to his basement studio in Long Island, and he comes up with the Galactus Silver Surfer trilogy of 1966, which in three issues... Kirby creates those three characters, along with this character, the Watcher. But Galactus and the Silver Surfer are the two biggies. When you pick up the actual comic book of that trilogy, they all say,

written by Stan Lee, drawn by Jack Kirby. Stan Lee did write the narration and dialogue, and he had a unique, quirky style that was the voice of early Marvel comics. So he got the credit, written by Stan Lee. The artists got a drawn by credit, but a lot of them felt that they should have gotten a story by or a characters by credit. And in the media, it seemed like Stan was getting all the credit. Some of the artists quit.

But Kirby stuck it out for years. In 2009, Kirby's descendants sued the company. This could have been a groundbreaking case that could have redefined how much corporations should give to the original creators of their IP. But before the case could have gone to the Supreme Court, Marvel settled with Kirby's estate for an undisclosed amount. If Jack Kirby is responsible for developing all these characters that have become pop culture icons, I wanted to know...

Where's the artist in the work? What can we learn about the man himself through the characters? To understand Jack Kirby, you have to go back to his childhood. So I did. Sort of.

On a cold spring day, my producer Stephanie Billman and I visited the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It's a few blocks away from the building where Jack Kirby grew up, but his name was Jacob Kurtzberg. Our tour guide was Jason Eisner, no relation to Will Eisner, another legendary comic book artist that I did an episode about. Jason brought us up to an apartment that was once owned by a Jewish family.

to give us a sense of what Kirby's childhood home might have been like. The apartment was tiny. I mean, today it would feel tight for one person, but entire families lived in these apartments, sleeping anywhere they could. Jason pointed out the window to a very wide street and told us that there used to be a very noisy elevated train there.

And then under that elevated train was like the red light district for, you know, New York City. So you wanted a taste for anything. You'd come on down to the Lower East Side and find it. OK. And that all that kind of criminal. element I think was something that the neighborhood related to constantly so tell me but I know that he famously got into so many brawls as a kid in this area what was it like for kids growing up here you know I think that

That spans the gamut. But from all the sources, all the different sources from around the time, the big fear. among the like progressive reformers and everything was that those kids were going to be lost to the streets. That was a big fear. You know, they're going to they're going to go into crime. You know, if they're going to be a newsboy, that's like that's the first step.

into being a gangster you know you're gonna be lost to the street now i mean some of there was truth to that i think that the period of time in which jack kirby was living down here was a really wild moment for the lower east side like there's a lot There's a lot going on. What about also like running through on the rooftops? Oh, yeah. I mean, like kids, when they hung out, hung out on the fire escapes, they played on the rooftops. You know, the roofs were also a place.

I mean, it was a strategic place in a fight. You know, you'd get to the rooftop and you had the high ground, you know, and you could just be thrown whatever it is you found, you know, at your enemies and maybe at the police. So there was also some stories about how. he would take charcoal that he found on like just around and he would draw on the tenement walls like on the in the hallways is that also something typical that kids would like draw on the walls or like just something like that

Yeah, I think there's all kinds. There's graffiti. If they like to draw, they draw and they're going to draw on everything, you know, and they will be unstoppable. And I mean, Jack Kirby was so prolific. I mean, he yeah, he was probably on. he was probably hated by the super you know yeah you i can imagine this is the super here right we're in the super's house and she'd be like what's what's the matter with you jack

Give him some paper, you know? So yeah. They said he couldn't afford paper. Like it was something. So he would just, he was so curious. So he would draw on the actual walls. Then the super would go to his mom and say, okay, you can't have him drawing on the walls.

And his mother was actually really impressed when she saw what he was drawing. So she was just like, okay, don't do that. And Stephanie, by the way, just winked. I saw it. I saw it. Having read a lot of Marvel comics, those images of fights in the alleyways and chases on rooftops feel very familiar to me. Randolph Hoppe runs the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center.

which is a website. It's a virtual museum. He says Kirby's childhood was perfect training for drawing slugfests. And Kirby really took to the fighting and started analyzing it. He noticed that when he was in the midst of it, that time would slow down and he could kind of see what was going on, even to the point where he got on a subway and went up to the Bronx.

just to see if they fought any differently up there. But what made Kirby's Heroes stand out was that every punch they threw packed a wallop. People make lots of jokes about Kirby in a way because of the huge fist that's on the drawing and then it goes to an arm and then the fist is two times larger than the character's head.

I remember as a kid trying to copy that style of the giant, Kirby's giant fist, and then the arm and the body flying, you know, like in deep perspective. And I was just like, why does this never look right? It's something that he developed. after at least 25 years of drawing every day. So, and then he had no formal training, right? Not really, no. The joke was that he went to Pratt, I believe it was, for a week or a day, and he would say that he drew too fast for them.

The sadder story is that he was in art school and then his father lost his job, so he couldn't go to art school anymore. And he had to go and get some work to help support the family. Jack understood anatomy. as well as any artist who's worked in comics. He just didn't let it stop him from drawing an interesting body. Mark Evanier, who worked as an assistant to Kirby, thinks that Jack Kirby had such a unique style with big blocky figures.

thick black lines, and action moving in 3D space because Kirby didn't have academic training. If you look at a lot of DC comics, especially the 50s when they kind of pasteurized the product down quite a bit. The way you know the emotion that's going on in some character's mind is to read his word balloon and see what he says. And he will probably tell you.

i'm really annoyed or i'm i'm despondent or whatever the thing he will just tell you what's going on with him and jack's people acted with their whole bodies

And that made the moments that were tender or sad or quiet all the more effective. The contrast was more extreme. And I think that was quite intentional on this part. Charles Hatfield wrote a book about Kirby called... Hand of Fire. It's the same thing with the so-called Kirby Crackle, which is that kind of...

dot or kind of smudges, those dot patterns that represent fizzing energy. It's Kirby's way of inking. Initially, I think it came from his inking. It also became part of his pencil drawing, where he's trying to energize the surface.

so that you in Kirby you don't have a solid drop shadow that's a solid chunk of black instead the shadow is broken up by a bunch of stuff and therefore the page has all this fizzing energy of just like mark making it's like and that is the energy of the violence that the characters feel inside them psychologically but it's also just a desire to make pages fun to look at and I think that with Kirby it's trying

Trying to hit realism as a target, failing, frankly, and then revving it up to a point where the pages just often feel like they're on fire. Kirby's Big Break came in 1941. This is back when everyone was trying to copy the success of Superman and Batman. He collaborated with a guy named Joe Simon to create Captain America, whose alter ego was Steve Rogers.

But Steve Rogers didn't come to Earth from another planet. He wasn't a billionaire crime fighter. Steve Rogers was a scrawny, scrappy fighter from the Lower East Side, like Kirby, at least until... Steve Rogers got the super soldier serum. Again, Arlen Schumer. All the fighting all comes out of Kirby using the garbage can lid as a shield like Captain America. Oh, did he really do that? Yeah.

That's where it all comes from. You know, throwing in the garbage can lid like a shield. And he appears in the spring of 41, seven months before we go to enter the war with Pearl Harbor. And he's literally an overnight success. What was interesting about that first Captain America movie they made in 2010 or whenever is that they actually paid homage to the reality that they would dress up actors as Captain America to stump for war bonds.

And this is all happening like immediately after he's created. Series E defense bonds. Each one you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy's gun. I don't think it's a coincidence that two Jewish guys created Captain America, who was famously punching Hitler on the front cover, back when a lot of Americans didn't want us to enter the war.

You might have seen that image because people tend to post it online whenever Nazism rears its head again, which it seems to do a lot lately. And for Kirby punching Nazis... wasn't just a fantasy. Here he is again in that old radio interview. I once had six Nazis call me up and they said, well, we're waiting for you downstairs and we're going to be. the daylights out of you, you know, for writing these stories about Hitler. These were New York Nazis, and they had a camp on Long Island.

By the way, if this was a Marvel comic, there would be an asterisk with an editor's note saying, See episode 57 of Imaginary Worlds, Man the High Castle, where I talked about the history of American Nazism, especially on Long Island. And so I said, hold on guys, I'll be right down. And of course I take the elevator down, but there was nobody there. I looked in the street and of course they wouldn't be there.

I didn't feel disappointed and I felt disappointed. It didn't matter to me one way or the other. You know, if they wanted a fight, well, what the heck. I would do it.

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After the war, the comic book industry went into a slump, partially because comics were being attacked for spreading juvenile delinquency. Kirby drew anywhere he could. Eventually, he joined up with Stan Lee and Stan's cousin, Martin Goodman. Their company, Atlas Comics, was falling apart. They renamed it Marvel Comics and started cranking out superhero.

after superhero part of the marvel formula was to have the characters set in the real world not gotham or metropolis they had real world problems and they even dealt with real political issues although in a comic booky way It was during this time that Jack Kirby brought back Captain America. As we know from the movies, Captain America is frozen, defrosted, and then joins the Avengers.

In the early 40s, Jack Kirby created this character in a place of youthful optimism. But now, Kirby was a veteran who had been to hell and back. During World War II, he served under General Patton. And this new incarnation of Steve Rogers is a man out of place. It's a theme that got picked up in the movies. I went under. The world was at war. I wake up, they say we won.

He didn't say what we lost. We've made some mistakes along the way. Some very recently. You here with a mission, sir? I am. Trying to get me back in the world? Trying to save it. Randolph Hoppe thinks this may have been how Kirby felt as a veteran. A lot of those guys, my dad included, I mean, it was like, you know, let's just... Get the GI Bill, get that house with the picket fence and have this happy family. And they really did not talk about that stuff. But Kirby did.

He was, you know, he was deeply, deeply affected by it. And I think that's where Captain America's kind of, you know, deep affectation of, you know, not having... acclimated to the life for the last 15 years or whatever it was at the time and suddenly coming out of it and still realizing his buddy has passed away and the world has changed. I can kind of get that.

The other ex-soldier character that Kirby created was Nick Fury, who ran the spy organization SHIELD. In the MCU, Nick Fury is played by Samuel L. Jackson. But in the comics, the character looks like a tall, muscular version of Kirby, with a shock of white hair over his ears, always smoking a cigar, just like Kirby. In fact, Kirby's son Neil has said,

Every time he looked at a drawing of Nick Fury, he saw his father. I believe that Jack Kirby was what I'd call a method cartoonist. One of the reasons why his... characters are so relatable is that he actually did put himself into a lot of them as he drew them. I think that sometimes he felt that he was Nick Fury and other times he was Ben Grimm.

As I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of parallels between Kirby and Ben Graham. But Charles Hatfield always thought of The Thing as being in the same category as The Hulk. the other famous monster slash hero that Kirby had a hand in creating. When you get to the thing in the Hulk, you really arrived at a new conception of what a superhero can be, a grotesque.

blocky, golem-like character infused with pathos filled with ungovernable anger, great fury. And even though Kirby's superhero comics remain kind of bright, moralistic, and positive. There's a lot of angst and a lot of ferociousness kind of embedded. That's something that superheroes might have always had potentially in them because the characters are freaks and outliers.

But boy, Kirby really turned up the juice on that quality. I think when people respond to the character of the Hulk, for example, as they have so positively of films like Thor Ragnarok or the Avengers films, they're seeing filmmakers that are capping some of what. what Kirby infused those characters with. So sad. Shut up. I lost my hammer. You're not even listening. Don't kick stuff.

What are you, crazy? Yes! You know what? Earth does hate you. Again, here's Kirby from that old radio interview. My idea for the Hulk didn't come from any fancy fall. You know place or anywhere it came from a mother whose child was crawling out from under the fender of an automobile The kid wasn't any more than two years old and this panicked the mother when she saw her child under the car and so the mother went she ran to the back of the car and she lifted up that the entire car from the back

because she had that strength of desperation. When I saw that, it suddenly dawned on me that there was a character there that's inside all of us, that when we become enraged.

And we can bend steel. I've done that myself. That's how the idea for the Hulk came about. Jack Kirby was never very interested in the lone hero type characters. He liked to develop teams, but they were never super friends. This also came from personal experience. He grew up in a neighborhood that was incredibly crowded.

people were getting on each other's nerves, and the neighborhood was divided by ethnic groups and gangs. But in World War II, he served with all these different guys from across the country that he never would have met otherwise. He was impressed by how they could work together towards a common goal and a greater good. So Kirby had a knack for developing superhero teams that were mismatched, dysfunctional, but got the job done. Like the Avengers.

Man, what are we, a team? No, no, no, we're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're a time bomb. You need to step away. Why shouldn't the guy let off a little steam? You know damn well why. Back off. Oh, I'm starting to want you to make me. Charles Hatfield says there's another Kirby trait which we have seen in the MCU. Kirby loved to mix different elements of sci-fi and fantasy that shouldn't go together, like magic and science. He was not the first comic book creator to do that.

but he was good at it. You can look at the lineup of the Avengers, a book that he started or co-started, where you have a mechanical Iron Man and a Norse god. and a shrinking ant-man and so on and see this kind of reckless blending of all these conventions from from different genres when we look at kirby's influence on these characters the part where it gets really interesting for me

is when we move away from Kirby's life experiences into his escapist fantasies. Kirby did not have a lot of schooling, but he read everything he could, and he was particularly interested in science. So he liked to imagine himself not just as a tough street fighter like Steve Rogers or Ben Grimm or a hardened veteran like Nick Fury, but he liked to imagine himself as a brilliant inventor like Reed Richards.

the leading man of the Fantastic Four, who also looks a bit like Kirby, with a shock of white hair above his ears. But Kirby's ultimate fantasies led him into the cosmos. He created the Silver Surfer, and helped to develop Thor, a tall, blonde, regal, godlike figure that was very different from Kirby. Charles Hatfield says Kirby was particularly interested in blending the ancient with the futuristic.

like on Thor's home planet of Asgard. When you're reading a Thor comic by Kirby, Thor, Odin, Loki, and all the rest in the mid-60s, You're seeing a kind of science fiction comic in which the gods of Asgard look into computer monitors or similar instruments. Look at the production design of the movie Thor Ragnarok.

The head of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, called it a, quote, love letter to Jack Kirby. And the director, Taika Waititi, took Kirby's graphic imagery from the comics, which looked like computer circuits designed by ancient Aztecs. and put them all over the film. The flip side to Asgard is Wakanda, the home of Black Panther. Jack Kirby often liked to create hidden worlds that few people knew about.

And like Asgard, Wakanda is a blending of the ancient and the futuristic. Which is so adaptable, kind of Afro-futurist aesthetic that the Black Panther film represents. I have great things to show you, brother. The entire suit sits within the teeth of the necklace. Strike it. Anywhere. Not that hard, genius!

You told me to strike it. You didn't say how hard. Arlen Schumer showed me concept art that Kirby created when he first pitched the character that would become Black Panther to Stan Lee and Martin Goodman, who ran the company. He doesn't look anything like what you think of the Black Panther. His costume and cape are more like Captain Marvel, but the crucial element...

is that he's a fully exposed black man. There is no mask. He's like a black Superman. Now, how does he wind up a year later, published in 1966 with a full face mask? Well, we also have a surviving piece of evidence.

that shows the Black Panther with a half mask like Batman. And that was rejected. Now, we don't have any written... paperwork explaining why it was rejected, but all evidence points to either Lee or Goodman were afraid that their Southern distributors in 1966, in the middle of the civil rights movement, that putting a black man...

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As I mentioned before, Stan Lee was the public face of Marvel. He gave really snappy quotes to journalists. He had a great rapport with the readers. When I read Marvel Comics as a kid, I always enjoyed reading his notes in the back. which he called Stan's Soapbox. Kirby was not comfortable doing stuff like that, although that didn't mean he wanted to be out of the spotlight completely. Did he talk to you about Stan Lee and the frustrations of Stan Lee taking too much credit?

Incessantly. Yeah, he talked about it a lot. When Mark Evanier met Jack Kirby in the early 70s, Kirby let Mark in on a secret. DC Comics was wooing him. Kirby was ready to leave Marvel, and he wanted Mark to be his new assistant at DC. It was one of the most important yeses I ever said in my life. But DC didn't give Kirby the kind of relief that he was hoping for.

I mean, it was a big coup that they stole Kirby away. They put all these ads in their comics saying, Kirby is coming. The great one is coming. But DC had also created a culture among their employees that was very anti-Marvel. There was this kind of shockwave for the company going, wait a minute, we don't like his work. That's not the style we want for DC.

And so he had some hostility there. And I don't think anybody intentionally sabotaged him, but you can get into an environment where you can't be yourself. You can't do your own work. And when... you know, people aren't really rooting that strongly for you to succeed. At first, Jack Kirby was given a huge canvas to work from. He created an interlocking comic book series called The New Gods.

They included characters like Darkseid, who eventually appeared as the big villain in Zack Snyder's Justice League film. And if you're not familiar with the New Gods, you might be more familiar with them soon. Warner Brothers just announced that they're producing an animated series based on the new gods. The show is going to focus on a character called Mr. Miracle. Charles Hatfield thinks this is another character inspired by Kirby's childhood.

Scott Free or Mr. Miracle, given that he escaped a kind of hell, you know, a hellish upbringing, speaks to some of the rough and tumble. tenement world that Jack Kirby lived in as a very young boy or even as an adolescent. And Mr. Miracle's kind of like that. He's raised in a hellish orphanage that was not Jack Kirby's situation, but he's raised in a kind of... of hell in a densely impacted and punishing environment. And he has to find within him a voice.

which is Kirby's source with a capital S, an almost, dare I say, godlike voice that will provide him with a tolerable human way out and some kind of freedom. But back in the 70s, people had doubts about the new gods. First, Stan Lee had been the voice of all of Jack Kirby's characters at Marvel. Stan was a natural at dialogue and narration. Even fans like Arlen Schumer were disappointed when they discovered that

When Kirby got a chance to write his own dialogue, it was clunky. Now remember his description of him as the thing? He moves like me, you know, guttural and instinctive. That was what his writing was like. So people who like Kirby's writing, it's like looking at the glass half full. They see it as, but it's exactly what he was like, you know.

instinctual from the gut, three exclamation points, you know, everything in, you know, italic bold caps. You know how when people on the internet write in all caps, it means they're shouting? All of Kirby's writing was like that. The other problem was that the New Gods weren't selling well enough. Although Randolph Hoppe thinks they may have been selling better than DC realized. The business model was changing back then. Distributors weren't getting enough accurate information.

But either way, they weren't getting good sales numbers. So after, what was it, two and a half years or something like that, they pulled the plug on Kirby's grand intertwined mythology. That was a...

Serious blow. This was a turning point in Kirby's career. He realized he would never find the freedom and respect he was looking for. So he went back to the devil he knew, Marvel. but going back was worse than he expected. Marvel put him on Captain America and Black Panther, characters he was very familiar with, but he wanted to keep inventing new stuff.

At the same time, his style was becoming outdated. The man who used to be called the king of comics was getting a new nickname. They were calling him Jack the Hack. For Mark Evanier, this was sad.

and frustrating to watch the number one motivating factor about him which you have to understand to understand jack was that that his he wanted to feed his family it was very important for him to have to pay the mortgage to be able to afford groceries to be able to get pay his kids doctor's bills and their dental bills when you are that successful you shouldn't be sweating that

When you have made your employer that much money, you shouldn't be worrying about doctor bills. You should be free from that kind of thing at his age. And he was still struggling with that. By the 1980s, Kirby had left Marvel again. He worked in animation and indie comics, but he spent a lot of his time fighting Marvel to get access to his own artwork. Kirby died in 1994.

A few years earlier, he gave an infamous interview where he bitterly claimed to be the creator of every Marvel character he worked on, shutting Stan Lee out of the creative process entirely. Fans took sides. And I've noticed even today, in both camps, people saying, look, I'm willing to acknowledge that this was a creative partnership. It's the other side that wants to claim that their guy should get all the credit for the characters.

it does leave the fans in a strange predicament. The whole point of the Marvel method and Marvel bullpen was to collaborate. And they weren't taking notes for future historians. They were just trying to meet their deadlines. And Kirby's family... did get a lot of money in the settlement, although you could argue it's probably not as much as those characters are worth. There's also no shortage of people now talking about how great Jack Kirby was, but he's not around to hear any of it.

Personally, I think the best way to honor his legacy is to keep telling the story of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, with an emphasis on and. I think the word and should be honored as much as the names attached to it. like when people talk about Lennon and McCartney. There's a whole world inside that little word, and. And Jack Kirby loved hidden worlds. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Arlen Schumer, Randolph Hoppe, Charles Hadfield, Jason Eisner, and Mark Evanier, who says we shouldn't go too far in assuming that Kirby identified with every character he developed. Yeah, somebody one time wrote this article about how Jack must have identified with Ant-Man because he was short. Jack's attitude was, who fantasizes about being the size of an ant?

Whose dream is that? And if you're short, that's the last thing you want to be is shorter. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with podcaster JR Forresteros about why Superman fans have split into two factions.

the different ideas about how the character should be portrayed. He's always thinking about how to make space for everyone else around him.

right he knows that he's the biggest guy the strongest guy he takes up the most space he has the most powerful punches and so he's always limiting himself for the good of everyone else and i think and no again no wonder the manosphere doesn't like that vision between imaginary worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on patreon you can also buy an ad-free subscription on apple podcasts if you support the show on patreon

At different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. Another way to support the show is to recommend it to a friend, post about it on social media, or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts.