Here’s a bit of fun news for comics fans. The video below is a report from CBS New York about the move to rename East Street on the Lower East Side after the great comic artist and creator ‘Jolly’ Jack Kirby.. Jolly Jack was born in that part of New York, and advocates of the change want the street called instead ‘Jack Kirby Way’. Kirby was the creator along with Stan Lee, of many of Marvel’s best-known and loved superheroes, most notably Captain America. The report states that he got death threats because the first issue showed the good Captain giving Hitler a punch in the kisser. I think the comic was published before America had entered the Second World War, and the comic, not surprisingly, angered the American Nazi party. Well, annoying and upsetting Nazis is itself a good and holy project. Both Kirby and Lee were Jews, so they had a perfect right to show an all-American hero beating the living daylights out of Adolf.
The report mentions that Kirby grew up in dire poverty. The backbone of the American comics industry were eastern European Jewish immigrants, living in overcrowded, squalid conditions/ Kirby, who always wanted to be an artist and signed on to an art course, said that when he was growing up the highest a man could aspire to in his neighbourhood was as a mechanic. The streets were occupied by gangs, and there were frequently fights between Jews and Italians. Kirby said that his art and career in comics were what stopped him getting drawn into the mob.
His real name was Kurzberger, but he drew for the comics under a number of different pseudonyms to give the impression that Timely, as Marvel’s predecessor was called, had more staff than it really did. Kirby was just one of them, but one that was his particularly favourite. He liked it because he thought it sounded similar to the surname of James Cagney, one of his heroes. In fact he used the name ‘Kirby’ so much that even his wife started calling him it and eventually someone persuaded him to change it formally.
The report describes the various bureaucratic steps the move has to go through before the authorities make a decision on it. I hope it will go through, and Jack KIrby will be suitably commemorated in the part of NYC where he grew up.
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