(JEWISH GROUP) How a Lower East Side Jew conquered the multiverse
All this time, comic book artist Jack Kirby was drawing himself.
In a street scene memory from the 1980s, we see the clothesline eruv of the old Lower East Side where he was born and raised: street toughs, peddlers, a cascade of garbage whooshing through a tenement window and an iceman in a horse cart. It could well be Yancy Street, where Ben Grimm, aka Thing, was initiated into a gang, before he took his fateful space flight and was reconstituted as a man made of rock.
The first salvo in the American war with the Germany was rendered in speed lines on Kirby’s cover of Captain America Comics #1, with super soldier Steve Rogers decking Hitler — wish fulfillment from a Jewish kid, who no doubt knew of the 1939 Nazi convention held at Madison Square Garden, just a block away from his old office at Fleischer Studios.
Kirby — born Jacob Kurtzberg — went to war, and, once he returned, created a comic with Jewish soldier Isadore “Izzy” Cohen, who shared his heavy brow. When Kirby entered his 40s, the time Jewish men start to study the Zohar, his work took dizzying turns into a collage multiverse. By the 1970s, he was drawing New Gods, with baroque piping on their suits resembling the spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Their ultimate foe, with his jutting jaw, could look a lot less like Mussolini.
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