The childhood tenement of comic book creator, Jack Kirby
Apartment photo via NYC Department of Records
Apple | Spotify | Stitcher | Transcript | Email
In this episode of Someone Lived Here, we follow the life of Jack Kirby starting in his apartment on Suffolk Street in the Lower East Side. The tenement is no longer standing, but the characters he created over his decades in the comic book industry are still everywhere you look.
This season, host Kendra Gaylord, is exploring homes that are no longer standing by learning their stories, all while staying self-isolated in her apartment in Brooklyn.
If you’d like to learn more about Jack Kirby and see his work throughout the years I would highly recommend the biography Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier.
Below is a transcript for season 2, episode 4 of Someone Lived Here, focused on the life of Jack Kirby and the places he lived. If you have any questions about the show or suggestions on how to make it more accessible please reach out at someonelivedhere@gmail.com.
The Lower East Side has changed endlessly since Jack Kirby grew up there in the 20s. The tenement where he lived on Suffolk Street was torn down. But so much of what Jack built in New York is stronger than ever: The Hulk, X-Men, Captain America, and Thor created a legacy, but for decades the co-creator was almost forgotten.
Welcome to Someone Lived Here, a podcast about the places cool people called home. I’m your host Kendra Gaylord. This season we will be learning the stories of homes that are no longer standing all from my still standing apartment in Brooklyn.
I saw Captain America: First Avenger in theaters opening weekend just like millions of other people. I watched as a scrawny Steve Rogers walk into a Brooklyn Antique Shop, where he was transformed into Captain America, I saw him fight in World War II and defeat Red Skull. But what I didn’t see or pay attention to were the credits. If you sit through the first credits, and get to the white words scrolling on a black screen, between the stunt work and the sound editors you’ll see “Based on the Marvel Comic by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”
That story and hundreds of others poured from Jack Kirby’s pencil in his multi-decade career. That first Captain America comic, boasted of 45 thrilling pages, but the cover was the most thrilling of all. Captain America giving Hitler a full bodied punch. What made those early comics pencilled by Jack so special is the movement. The templates weren’t squares and the characters didn’t stay in them. Captain America was constantly fighting his enemies, but also the idea that paper was enough to contain him. The first issue arrived at newsstands in December of 1941, right as the United States joined World War II.
Jack Kirby would later join the US Army, starting as a rifleman and working his way to a Private First Class. But before we get there, I want to bring you to the location were Jack Kirby’s story really began. Before he was Jack Kirby, he was Jack Kurtzberg, a first-generation kid living in the Lower East Side. The apartment where he spent much of his childhood was 131 Suffolk Street.
The photo is in black and white, but it looks a lot like many of the tall thin brick buildings you see in New York. It’s 5 floors high, with a fire escape that suggests it was built before 1901, when the Tenement House Act began requiring the stairs that you see on fire escapes today. The fire escapes here are different just a long ladder stretching from the top floor down to the second. This tenement along with all the other buildings and businesses on this block are no longer there. It’s now a school and the adjoining playground .
But we are lucky to not just have a photo of the place where Jack lived, but also his account put down on paper in a way only he could. One of Jack Kirby’s last comics was called Street Code, the owner of a bookstore in California had commissioned him after hearing him talk about his childhood. It’s amazing, because it doesn’t rely solely on words, but instead combines his detailed drawing style and his memories. On the second page we see the kitchen. His mother scrubbing clothes in the bathtub. A pan is steaming on an iron stove. On the next page we are in the halls of the tenement, walking down the staircase. The plaster is chipping off the walls, showing the wood-lathe, and a man is buckling his pants as he exits the hallway bathroom.
But the real masterpiece is the two page insanely detailed spread that shows the streets of the Lower East Side as Jack saw them. There is no better word to describe it than chaos. Horse carriages are sharing the road with cars, and trolleys. Kids are in the street playing stickball. Trash is being poured from a window up above. Vegetables being sold on the street down below. And thats just the street level. The buildings are tenements and churches. Full clotheslines are strung between fire escapes. which are all the ones with the ladders by the way.
There is one last detail that I love in this comic. It begins when a kid screams “BLOCK FIGHT”. All the kids are running to meet on the roof top and fight. But one of the drawings confused me a bit, the kids are running through gravestones as a man yells at them from his door. Rocks and bottles are being thrown by the kids who have already made it to the roof. But there aren’t any graveyards in these blocks. But when you look a little more closely at the photo of Jack’s apartment building it makes a little more sense. Two doors down was Ginsburg Monument Works, with stones of varying sizes filling the undeveloped space between the buildings. In the photo, taken a few years after Jack lived in that apartment it looks like they got much higher fences with some additional barbed wire.
Jack’s Jewish parents left Austria and came to New York in the early 1900s century. His father Ben was a tailor, and often worked at a garment factory. Money was extremely tight but despite that his parents quickly saw it was necessary to supply him with paper, especially after the tenement’s janitor found him drawing on the floors. They bought large pads of onionskin paper, but had to ration off each piece because he would fill them so quickly.
Jack dropped out of high school in 11th grade, his family needed the extra income, but the only thing he knew how to do or wanted to do was draw. He took odd jobs drawing, painting signs for local businesses.
Around 18 he answered a newspaper ad looking for artists. He ended up in the animation studio who made Popeye and Betty Boop. But there was already a hierarchy and even towards the top the creative opportunities were limited. He was promoted multiple times, but he still wasn’t making much money and hated copying other artist’s work.
It was then that he got a job drawing comic panels. The company was the low cost option for newspaper’s who couldn’t get the larger comic syndicated. The pay was less than his previous job, but there was the promise of a bonus structure that never actualized. But what he did find was a place that let him do every type of work and have creative control. From the outside you would think that you were seeing the work of 5 different people, but inside, Jack used different names for each strip.
Jack moved from comic strips to comic books, finally giving his work some space to spread out. The comic industry hadn’t really gotten it’s footing on how to make money and neither had he. Jack was always impressed and jealous of the artists who could handle the business end of things.
One of those people was Joe Simon. He was an artist and editor, who was 4 years older and almost a foot taller that Jack. Joe started as his supervisor, but the two became partners. They each filled in each other’s deficits. We’re going to come back to Joe and Jack but first we need to look at Jack’s new housing situation.
By 23, Jack Kirby and his parents had moved into the first floor of a 2 story duplex apartment right near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. On the second floor lived Roz Goldstein. Roz would later say, “Almost the first thing he said was, “Would you like to see my etchings?” I didn’t know what the word etchings meant so he explained “my drawings” He wanted to take me into his bedroom and I thought, Why not? His parents are in the next room, my parents are in the next room, what could happen?
So he takes me to his bedroom and – can you believe it? – he really did have etchings in there. He showed me all these drawings including pages he was drawing of Captain America. He showed me the first comic books I had ever seen.”
They were the first comics Roz saw, but they certainly weren’t going to be the last. Jack and Roz were married in the spring of 1942. Jack was 24, Roz was 19.
Now let’s get back to those early comics created by Joe and Jack. The office they worked together in was called Timely Inc. It was there that they first met Stanley Leiber, before he was Stan Lee. He was the 18 year old office assistance. Stan would recall about his early days, “Jack and Joe were virtually the whole staff. Jack sat at a table behind a big cigar and he was drawing. I was a gofer. I’d go for the coffee, for the broom for Jack’s cigars. They also let me write some copy.”
Despite the remarkable success of Captain America, Jack and Joe knew something was happening to their cut of the profits. Timely’s owner Martin Goodman put every possible business expense against the comic, meaning Jack and Joe were making a percentage of barely anything. It seemed impossible that the best selling comic book was barely turning a profit. So Jack and Joe started quietly planning a move to DC. But Goodman somehow found out and fired them both.
DC at first didn’t seem ready for Jack and Joe. The two refused to work from written scripts and the editor was frustrated, but the audiences loved their stuff. They would revamp old stories and character and create originals. Two of those originals focused on kid gangs. Jack seemed to be pulling directly from his childhood, and in each of them there was a character with a New York accent who seemed a lot like Jack. But the kids in these stories weren’t just fighting the next street over, but instead they were fighting in the war effort, helping the US win.
Jack would be heading to Europe soon, but before he and Joe worked as hard as they could before they did. Jack had said the goal was, “to get enough work backlogged that I could go into the Army, kill Hitler, and get back before the readers missed us.” It didn’t work out exactly that way for Jack. The next two years would alter his life and his work. Jack was first placed as a mechanic, but as a New York City kid who barely interacted with cars it didn’t work out, so then he was part of Company F of the 11th Infantry. He landed at Omaha Beach two months after D day. He wrote letters to Roz that were half words, half drawings. Here is a piece of one, “Along the vast horizon a long, thin line of men advanced through the light drizzle – formless, slow under their heavy clothing and equipment. This’ll give you a pretty sketchy, but general idea of the bunch on the move. Featured the guy you’re mostly concerned with.” In the sketch, Jack Kirby is wearing a long coat and helmet. Even though its just with pencil on some random stationary he was sure to include his fellow soldiers in the background and the mud flying off the back of his boot as he ran.
A few months later he was in the Siege of Bastogne. He would later talk about those weeks of heavy combat, “The weather was brutal. We were losing men to pneumonia and exposure.” Jack Kirby was almost one of them. As his unit was withdrawing he could barely move. His feet had been frostbitten. At a hospital in France, doctors discussed the possibility of amputating one or both of his feet. After a month he recovered and was able to walk again.
When Jack returned from service he found DC comics different. When Joe had enlisted he was sent to Washington, DC to assemble comic books for the military and had yet to be discharged. The editors didn’t want Jack running the show.
Once Joe was back the two would start fresh again, this time creating their own shop. Here they created a wide variety of comics: Romance, crime, horror, and war. Foxhole was the war comic, which he would sign Private First Class Jack Kirby. Roz said, “He would have been very happy to spend the rest of his life just drawing the war stories he told everyone all the time.”
Jack Kirby was making some big life moves and he finally got something he had always wanted: to get out of the city. Jack and Roz bought a newly constructed house on Long Island. It’s a small colonial with bricks on the first floor and shingles on second. After WWII a lot of suburban homes were being built and this home in East Williston was no different. This one cost $9,400. It would be the home where Jack and Roz would raise their kids for the next, but making those mortgage payments would not always be easy.
Things were changing in the comic book industry. Psychologists claimed that comics, especially crime and horror, caused juvenile maladjustment. The Senate Judiciary committee was meeting to discuss the regulation of comic books. Newsstands stopped carrying them. The major comic brands joined together to create their own self regulatory system and if you didn’t join you wouldn’t get distribution. Jack said it was like the business got together and said, “You can’t ruin our comics! We beat you to it!”
Joe and Jack joined, but it didn’t make a difference. The shop closed and Jack Kirby was back to square one. The industry was getting smaller and to keep comics coming, companies were reducing page rates by half. There was one option, but Jack wasn’t sure he wanted to take it.
Timely Inc was were Jack Kirby had first published Captain America, he and Joe had been in charge. But after they were fired the young Stan Lee had been made the editor. He would now be working under his former assistant. But after many freelance jobs and a lawsuit for breach of contract he found himself as he said, “Shipwrecked at Marvel.”
But if he felt stuck his work didn’t seem that way. Stan Lee was putting out about 10 comics a month with a tight budget. Jack drew for the teen comics and monster comics. The monsters were creatures called Thing and Hulk, they don’t look like the characters we think of now, but Jack saw them as the precursor to the idea that the monsters were not all monsters.
This seems like a good time to talk about the Marvel Method which will help explain the creation of amazing characters that you now see in every movie. Stan would later describe it like this, “I’d be writing a script for Ditko to draw. Jack would come in to drop off a job he’d finished and he’d want another script to start on. I’d tell him, ‘I can’t get you one now. I have to finish Ditkos. But so that Jack wouldn’t leave empty-handed, we’d talk out a plot and I’d send him off to draw it. That way he’d have work, and after he handed the pages in I’d write the dialogue.” This creation style let the artist make big decisions on page layout and spreads, but it also makes it pretty difficult when you ask who came up with what?
In the early 60s Jack Kirby drew Fantastic Four, and then the Incredible Hulk and then the Might Thor, and then Sargent Nick Fury, then the Avengers, and then X-Men. Some of these he would do dozens of issues, others he would do the first few issues and then it was passed to other artists. Another artist said, “Stan wanted Kirby to be Kirby, Ditko to be Ditko and everyone else to be Kirby.” Jack’s style became the house style and the other artists were meant to emulate it.
But where was this house style happening? It was in the basement of that colonial. They called it “The Dungeon”. The door was closed to keep the cigar smoke in. In 2012, Jack’s son Neal wrote about his dad’s workspace, “Memories of that house are still vivid, but what I remember most is my father’s studio. Buried in the basement, The Dungeon was tiny (just 10 feet across), and the walls that separated it from the rest of the cellar were covered in tongue and groove knotty pine with a glossy varnish. Dad’s drawings table faced a beautiful cherry wood cabinet and a 10-inch black and white TV. To the left was a beat- up four drawer file cabinet that was stuffed with Dad’s archive of picture references to well, everything. For hours I would mull through the musty folders with bayonets, battleships, cowboy hats, skyscrapers – countless files, countless subjects.”
Jack saw himself in a few of his characters. He once said, “Nick Fury is how I wish others saw me. Ben Grimm [The Thing] is probably closer to the way they do see me.”
He had reason to think people saw him a certain type of way. Marvel was becoming extremely successful, but not much had changed for him. Articles came out talking about Stan Lee as the creative genius and Jack Kirby taking his dictation. And creatively the two continued to clash. Without any guidance Jack had introduced the Silver Surfer to a Fantastic Four comic. Stan first thought he had gone to far considering there had been no discussion of the character. But Stan soon called him a favorite. The Silver Surfer would get his own comic, but it would make it with another artist.
This lead to Jack Kirby no longer suggesting new characters. He had been burned too many times. Roz would say, “No more Silver Surfers until he gets a better deal.” And what was Jack asking for, some long-term financial security, health insurance, and a pension. His biggest fear is he would no longer be able to draw and his wife and 4 children would have nothing to show for his work.
And then suddenly Marvel was sold and the new owners were happy that Stan Lee agreed to stay on. Jack had a lawyer contact the new owners, letting them know that he was also a creator. One of the executives even thought Stan had written and drawn all the comics.
Jack’s contract had expired under the previous owner and when he received a new one, it was somehow worse than his pre-existing one. The pay was the same and there was no credit. They could fire him whenever. If he signed he would not be able to sue them for work from the past or the future. He refused.
Jack learned from his experience and would no longer be partnered with a writer. If the writer was always given credit, he would be the writer too. Jack Kirby would spend the next decade jumping from DC back to Marvel and then to film and animation, and he would continue to circle around one of his favorite topics, mythology. At DC in 1971 he created New Gods, the story of a god who uses power called The Source and is revealed to be the estranged son of the Darkseid the biggest villain. And later back at Marvel he would create The Eternals who were created by Gods and were intended to defend the earth.
Jack work changed in the late 70s his drawings were slanted in odd perspectives. People thought he’d stopped caring about his work, but in reality he was working harder than ever. He was in his early 60s and his vision in one eye was getting worse.
He had moved to California years earlier to a ranch style house in Thousand Oaks. But he also found a home at a cartoon studio in Hollywood. There he would draw bigger which helped his eyesight. Twice a week, Roz would drive him to the studio (as we know he was never a good driver). There he would be greeted by all the young cartoon artists who had grown up admiring his work. His business card read “Producer” and possibly best of all he had health insurance. Which would prove needed as in the coming years he had a heart attack and bypass surgery both of which he would survive.
By the time Jack stopped drawing comics the industry started to change. DC was paying out royalties on any new properties. They had Jack do new development art on New Gods so he was grandfathered in. DC also began returning original artwork to it’s artists as the comic conventions now made these pieces valuable.
And speaking of conventions, loved them. He went to every ComicCon and stood for as long as his fans did. He lived to see his work loved and respected. In 1994, Jack Kirby would die in the kitchen of his Thousand Oaks home at the age of 76. Roz Kirby would continue to go to the comic conventions and like they had stood and clapped for Jack, they would stand and clap for her. Roz would die four years later.
Their son Neal would later write, “I think about Dad a lot lately, especially when I see Thor, Magneto, or the Hulk on a movie poster. My father drew comics in six decades and filled the skies of our collective imaginations with heroes, gods, monsters, robots and aliens. I treasure the fact that I had a front-row seat for that cosmic event.”
If you’d like to learn more about Jack Kirby or see some of his work, I would highly recommend the book Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier which was extremely helpful in researching. And thank you to my brother Brendan who kept showing me different comics until I found the ones I loved.
Thank you for listening to Someone Lived Here. If you’d like to support the show, check out our Patreon where every level gets a sticker in the mail. Be sure to leave a review and tell others if you enjoy the show. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Thank you Tim Cahill for our music.
Sources:
Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier
Creator: Jack Kirby in the Census and Army by Alex Jay from Tenth Letter of the Alphabet Blog
Captain America Comics #1 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, 1941
Superheros were part of the family by Neal Kirby in the Los Angeles Times – Sunday, May 6, 2012
Fire Escapes in Urban America: History and Preservation by Elizabeth Mary André
NYC Department of Records & Information Services – 1940 Tax Photos
Nassau County New York Land Records Viewer
Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library.
