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The cover of the first issue of Captain Americashows the superhero punching Hitler in the face. Jack Kirby, the man who drew it in 1940, went on to fight in World War II against that real-life villain and later to co-create much of the Marvel Universe we know today. But his credit for it has been largely lost to history, something he fought against his entire career.
“There are a lot of people who would consider themselves Marvel fans that have never picked up a comic book. They don’t know who Jack Kirby is,” says producer Bren Rapp, who’s raising his profile with a play tracing Kirby’s critical contribution to the comics boom and its highly profitable big-screen offshoots. “That speaks to the staying power of those stories, these heroes and how they’re in our psyche. But we’re so far removed from how it started.”
In the play’s first full production from Rapp’s new non-fiction oriented American Chronicle Theatre Company, King Kirby seeks to reclaim the artist and storyteller’s place in comics lore. It was written by Crystal Skillman and Fred Van Lente. Doak Rapp directs.
Bren Rapp has incorporated Kirby’s evolving artistic style into what she calls a “live theatre motion comic” combining live performance from five actors with interactive projections drawn by North Texas animator, cartoonist and motion graphics artist J. Schuh.
J. Schuh
Artist’s full-color rendering of a projection from American Chronicle Theatre Company’s production of “King Kirby.” It illustrates Jack Kirby’s work as an Army scout during World War II.
“Motion comic is a form of animation where they take comic book panels and add slight motion to them, panning and zooming and using voiceover for the characters,” Rapp explains. “What we’re doing is re-creating that feel with projections behind the actors, but not just of locations. There’s also a screen where they’ll be interacting with drawings and shadow puppets. It’s like we’re bringing that whole motion concept feel to the stage.”
The actors play Kirby, his wife, his writing partners Joe Simon and Stan Lee, and Martin Goodman, the founder of Marvel predecessor Timely Comics. Other characters like Kirby’s father, a Jewish immigrant and factory worker, and George Patton, his World War II commander, are rendered as animations.
But you won’t see Captain America or any of Kirby’s other comic creations. They’re owned by Disney and protected by copyright laws. That tension between the creators and the companies who hired them is one of the major themes of King Kirby.
“He was determined not to become like his father, but in the end that’s what he ended up being,” Rapp says. “He’s churning out pages and pages of oftentimes his own ideas and his own characters and his own stories and not benefiting from them. He became labor, just like his father was.”
Kirby’s family sued Marvel after his death. They wound up settling out of court.
Andrew J. Knowles
Comic book artist Jack Kirby (Jon Garrard) at his drawing table in American Chronicle Theatre Company’s production of “King Kirby.”
Having worked on newspaper comic strips, Popeye cartoons and early comic books in the 1930s, Kirby was hired by Timely to find an answer to DC’s Superman, who first appeared in Action Comics #1. Born Jacob Kurtzberg, Kirby and his writing partner Joe Simon came up with Captain America before going on to invent romance comics after the war.
“His faces show a great deal of emotion,” Rapp says in describing Kirby’s style. “His villains, you get into their psyche. He was constantly in fights as a child. You’ll see a lot of that in his work, these very graphic knock-down, drag-out fights. He actually killed people in World War II. It wasn’t like he had a cushy position. He was a scout in Normandy going into locations and killing Nazis. He had a deep well to draw from. When you hear his story, you can see it in the work.”
Kirby and Simon also worked for the predecessor to Marvel rival DC and other comic producers. Though they sometimes received a share of the profits, deciding where to take their talents was often governed by a feeling that they weren’t being adequately compensated.
“What he brought to his work was a sense of humanity. His characters had failings and frailties, even though they were heroes,” Rapp says. “They were mutants who had to band together in order to beat someone, ragtag people who were the underdogs. Compare that to Superman, who had no failings and took pity on us humans. Kirby’s credited with creating this idea of the superhero team that have to unite to fight evil. I think it was colored by his upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen and what he saw in World War II.”
In the 1960s, after Simon left the industry, Kirby and Lee created enduring titles like The Fantastic Four, The X-Men and The Avengers, who included Iron Man, the Hulk and Thor, some of whom got their own spinoff books. Lee, a master promoter, wound up with most of the accolades.
“Stan Lee is beloved. But he’s kind of the villain in our play,” Rapp says. “Jack would have these meetings with Stan and would go off and create the whole story in drawings, then Stan would come in, write some narration boxes, write some dialogue and get the credit. But what if there never was a Stan Lee? Would Jack Kirby’s drawings and characters have endured? Would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe? That’s what this play’s about, when the artist is forgotten and the art lives on. Kirby waged a fight for recognition and never really got it.”
July 4-12 at Cox Playhouse, 1517 H Ave., Plano. $15. americanchronicletheatreco.com
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