Jack Kirby: Likeness

“There was power in the work of Jack Kirby that changed the way I looked at things. There was no one else like him and there never will be.”

Jack Kirby

Source: Guillermo del Toro, Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel’s grand Hollywood adventure, and his family’s quest http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/jack-kirby-the-forgotten-hero-in-marvels-grand-hollywood-adventure/, The Los Angeles Times, (September 25, 2009).

Way , Change

“Well, it was a radical concept to me. Like any other American, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to study all its facets. All I knew about it was it was foreign to democracy. And here I was, I had been fighting for democracy and always aware of two political parties and brought up in that kind of atmosphere. Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn’t want to see a thing like that.”

Jack Kirby

TCJ Archive, Jack Kirby Interview http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal

Family , Democracy , Communication , Study

“Superheroes may be superhuman in stature but inside they’re human beings and they act and react as human beings. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing legendary characters like Hercules or modern characters, you’ll find that humans are humans and they’ll react the same way in certain situations.”

Jack Kirby

Source: “1993: Jack Kirby: The Hardest Working Man in Comics by Steve Pastis” https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/category/interview/, Happening Magazine, (1993) by Steve Pastin; as quoted by Rand Hoppe, The Kirby Effect The Journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, (28 April 2018).

Way

“Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn’t want to see a thing like that.”

Jack Kirby

TCJ Archive, "Jack Kirby Interview" http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal, (February 1990, posted May 23, 2011).

Family , Hurt , Evil , Communication

“I was a young man. I was still growing out of the East Side. The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it.”

Jack Kirby

Source: 1990, Gary Groth interview

Guy

“No, we didn’t do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the “Strange World of Your Dreams.””

Jack Kirby

Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”.
Context: page 4 http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/4/ 1990, Gary Groth interview

Housing , Dreams , People , Way