There was a time when the work of one of the 20th Century’s greatest artists could be had for a dime.
That artist is the subject of a new exhibition: “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity,” which opened last week at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Kirby was the creator or co-creator of many of the most iconic superhero characters ever dreamed up – Captain America, the X-Men, the Avengers, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor and more – as well as a stylistic innovator whose work changed the industry and has continued to reverberate over the decades.
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A combat veteran of World War II, Kirby served as an infantry scout, often entering hostile areas alone to gauge the danger – “If somebody wants to kill you, they make you a scout,” Kirby once told an interviewer. He saw horrors up close, channeling those experiences into war comics like “Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos,” “Battle” and “The Losers” among them – as well as introducing Captain America by showing him socking Adolf Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first comic.
The exhibition shows the dizzying range of Kirby’s work, its development and evolution over time, and its inventiveness and continuing influence on our culture. My colleague Peter Larsen wrote about the exhibit, and I got to walk through it with co-curator Ben Saunders, who grew up in Wales reading Marvel Comics and eventually became a professor of English at the University of Oregon, where he founded the first comic studies minor in the world about 15 years ago.
Saunders makes the case for Kirby as one of the artistic giants of the last century, citing his influence on everything from comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe to musicians like Paul McCartney (who wrote “Magneto & Titanium Man” based on Kirby’s work) and masked rapper MF Doom as well as inspiring novelists such as Jonathan Lethem and Glen David Gold, the latter an expert on Kirby who contributed rare materials to the exhibit.
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