Saw the most interesting comic strip in the newspaper the other day. My wife was reading the paper, and it caught her eye. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, so she showed it to me.
We questioned what the deeper gag was. I mean, okay, Sisyphus endlessly pushing the rock up the hill. The Thing = rocks. Rocky hide. Head. Rock. Okay, but it was still gnawing at me — what was I missing? Or, was that it?
It’s obviously a Thing head drawn by Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Marvel universe. I frequent a Facebook page called “Old Guys Who Like Old Comics”, and lo and behold, the strip popped up again.
This one guy scanned it in from his Sarasota, Florida paper — this strip was probably all over the country, as it was syndicated. This guy was just as bewildered as I was. What was the gag beyond the obvious?
King Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top.
The guy in the group mentioned a variation of this, but obviously, there were others that detected there was more here than meets the eye.
What kicked this to the next level for me was being reminded that it was *King* Sisyphus. Jack “King” Kirby? Then the whole thing leveled up.
I know nothing of the artist himself, Harry Bliss, but it was mentioned he’s also a big Kirby fan.
Jack Kirby was one of the major creators and influences in the comic book world. Along with Joe Simon, he created Captain America in the early 1940’s. Kirby was fast, prodigious and powerful with his storytelling and pulse pounding panels. He drew for most of the major companies through all of the ’40’s and ’50’s. In the early ’60’s, he co-created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the X-men, and more.
He worked most every day at home, down in his den at an old, battered drawing table, on a hard, simple, uncomfortable looking chair. No one worked harder.
Jack kept his head down and drew. That’s it, just churning out page after page, day after day for years. He’d get a plot synopsis from editor and co-creator Stan Lee, and then breakdown the issue’s plot across 20 pages, taking whatever liberties he could along the way to build up the story, making it bigger, bolder, more explosive.
He made dialog notes in the margins as he went and when done, brought the pages back to the office. There, Stan would add the dialog building up the story even more, working from Jack’s pencil layouts.
But as the 1960’s rolled on, Jack felt he wasn’t getting his due credit. As I say, Jack kept his down and drew. He never read the finished product of any of the comics. He just handed them in, thinking Stan would just use his, Jack’s notes for the dialog. Then have the pages lettered, inked, colored, published.
Jack was under the impression he wrote the books because of these miscommunications. But Jack was not a writer. Stan did the writing but Jack –amazingly–didn’t realize this.
Stan knew enough to be the first to put prominent title boxes at the beginning of every comic giving credit to all the creators, but Jack never saw it.
Jack wanted absolutely nothing to do with the money end, promotion end, business end of the comic world. He only wanted to draw, so Stan was the face of Marvel, and unlike the quiet Kirby who kept his head down to just draw, Stan was the ultimate pitchman and he was everywhere. So the media made it all about him. But Jack didn’t like that very much either. There was resentment.
Stan’s style of prose was explosive and dynamic in it’s own right. Perhaps the single most universally recognized constant about Marvel at the time, be it on the Fantastic Four with Kirby, Spider-man with Steve Ditko, or any of the Marvel comics of the day, was Stan’s writing. By that point, Stan had been writing for Marvel for 20 years, stretching back to when it was still called Timely comics.
But when Jack first worked with him around 1940, Stan was the newly hired kid who looked after the office and got the coffee. So to now be working for him 20 years later had to be a bit awkward. But Stan knew the talent he had access to and with this band of artists, the Marvel age of comics were born. Jack just kept on drawing.
Most of all, Jack wanted a raise, and that’s where the real problem emerged, as Jack had a family to support. But the guy who paid the bills, publisher Martin Goodman, considered Jack to be nothing more than another cog in the machinery, and an unimportant one at that. So no raise for Jack. The resentment built.
And Jack drew.
In 1970, Jack moved over to the competition, DC comics, formerly known as National comics, who was initially ecstatic to have The King come on over. Jack had held back some of his ideas from Marvel, since, in his mind, he wouldn’t get the credit for them anyway. So DC got Darksied and the New Gods, all part of The Fourth World Series. He also took on the duties of Jimmy Olsen’s comic.
But there were unforeseen problems. Jack thought he could just start a ton of new books with new ideas and then leave the property to the next creator, as he kept churning out ideas. But DC didn’t want other creators to continue, they wanted him, his style.
But the DC fans didn’t. Jack’s style was “too rough, too Marvel” for the rather sedate, clean, pleasant, or placid look of DC books. To add insult to injury, Superman would guest in Jimmy Olsen’s book but editorial had a different artist come in to redraw Superman’s face, as Kirby’s was thought to be too harsh. This insult did not make Jack happy.
Then you had ultra realistic artists like Neal Adams, who produced intense, beautiful artwork, which was the polar opposite of Jack’s rough, powerhouse style.
In the end, Jack was not considered a good fit for DC and by the mid ’70’s was back at Marvel. But this was a different Jack, who didn’t want anyone else writing his books, as he finally wanted to get credit for the work.
But again, Jack, although he was the King of comic artists, wasn’t a writer. The New Gods at DC was a strange enough animal that Jack got away with some of the clunkier verbiage, but his remaining days at Marvel were not the best.
In the ’80’s, Jack was greeted with open arms in the animation world, coming up with new creations like Thundaar the Barbarian, and did a lot of storyboard breakdown work for the companies. He and his wife Roz moved from New York to California for the better climate and all this worked great, seeing as how that’s where the animation studios were. When leaving NY, the *last* item to be loaded in the moving truck was Jack’s drawing table, so it was the first thing off-loaded in Cali. Jack had to draw, to work.
It was during these last years that Jack finally got his due credit. Proper compensation and finally benefits such as health insurance for him and the family. Perhaps greatest of all, he was the guest of honor at many huge comic conventions, where thousands upon thousands of people finally had the chance to thank Jack for his decades of magnificent work.
Marvel still dines out on the many characters Jack co-created, but DC has long since had Kirby’s Darksied as their main cosmic villain, some 50 years after Jack created him.
The thing is, simple gag or not, and take from it what you will—that image of the King and his struggles really got me thinking.
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