Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution

The Startling, Senses-Shattering, Pulse-Pounding Saga of the Sensational Jack Kirby!

It might seem ludicrous for a man in his thirties to "discover" the legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby. To those who regard comics as "funny books" (unless the New York Times likes them), the idea of a rational adult discovering in the midst of his fourth decade what, in civilized society, is supposed to be confined to the first two decades, must seem unthinkable. On the other hand, to those who read and love comics, the notion of a lifelong reader only learning to appreciate a master like Kirby so relatively late in life must be utter heresy.

When I started reading comics in the early 1980s, I was drawn to the more bombastic and stylish artists, guys like Frank Miller and Art Adams and John Byrne, each of whom owed many debts to Kirby. However, much as I discovered years after its release that the comedy "classic" Animal House had not only been ripped off but actually improved upon by its countless imitators, so the aforementioned artists built on Kirby's strengths while eschewing his weaknesses. To my childish eyes, Jack Kirby's art appeared stiff, blocky, and outright lame. It didn't help that, by the '80s, every Kirby character was pretty much interchangeable; the women and men had only to swap hairdos to exchange identities.

It took a long time for the adult in me to come to appreciate Kirby's seminal achievements. As the man who co-created (that prefix being a point of intense contention during his lifetime) such classic characters as the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Hulk, Dr. Doom, the X-Men, and countless other Marvel Comics heroes and villains, Kirby's influence on an industry that had grown unbearably stagnant by the dawn of the 1960s cannot be overstated. And yet, it's taken me more than thirty years to look at a Kirby drawing and not only find it aesthetically pleasing, but to appreciate the dynamism, the revolutionary visual storytelling that he helped pioneer, and which makes his comic work so much fun to admire when the stories and dialogue can seem quaint, kitschy, or impenetrable. It's one of the primary reasons that first-rate artists of the Art Spiegelman school, who would have as little to do with superhero nonsense as possible, greatly admire Kirby's work.

Ronin Ro's Tales to Astonish functions as a sort of dual biography of the Marvel founders, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. As Lee's life is told in a minimal amount of detail, Kirby is clearly Ro's point of interest -- and even more specifically, Kirby's comic work. In short, tidy, swift-moving paragraphs, Ro skims over incidents that would eat up whole chapters of a denser biography. Kirby fought in World War II and, like most vets, had some experiences that are astonishing, poignant, even surreal -- yet Ro speeds right past these events like a comic writer rushing through his hero's obligatory origin story to reach the first, breathless fight scene.

During a ferocious shelling from the enemy, Jack sat in a foxhole and steadied his nerves by sketching in a notepad. But a shell landed near his foxhole and hit one of his friends, blowing his head clean off. Jack returned to his sketch later on and saw that some of his friend's head was on his drawing.

...the Phantom Bullet and his ice gun, the Shadow-like Phantom Reporter, androids Ruby the Robot and Marvex the Super Robot, the cape-wearing Dynaman, Stuporman, and the Purple Mask (not to be confused with the pre-existing Green Mask, Grey Mask, Red Mask, White Mask, or...Fiery Mask).

From the moment The Fantastic Four #1 broke sales records, Kirby became a fan favorite and the most influential artist of the time. Stan Lee would hand pages of Kirby's work to new artists and tell them to "draw like Jack." Within a few years, Marvel was regularly trouncing its chief rival, the longtime juggernaut DC Comics, thanks in large part to Kirby's robust style, which by then had become pervasive throughout the whole company's line.

This is the headiest section of the book, the one that comics lovers will consume the way Kirby's Galactus devoured whole planets. As a kid, I readily bought into the self-promotional aspect of the Marvel Bullpen as a bunch of characters every bit as outsized as the superhero pantheon. I revered Stan "The Man" Lee and imagined the thrill of inventing the adventures of Spider-Man or the X-Men. Comic books were my mythology (and probably, to some degree, still are), and creators like Lee, Steve Ditko, and John Romita, Sr., were my Homers. (Never mind that I'd reached the approximate era of Euripides by adolescence; I still admired those old poets and their dusty yet timeless tales.) Although I didn't appreciate Kirby's work personally, the reverence in which he was held by his contemporaries made me respect his contributions even then. To peek behind the curtain in Tales to Astonish is alternately revelatory, thrilling, and disappointing. These men weren't larger-than-life deities or ingenious lunatics -- just overworked, often underappreciated wage slaves. No wonder the Marvel characters' human failings were so palpable.

It's astounding to realize the immediate power of something that has become an institution. Just as it's nearly impossible for me to imagine a time when nobody had heard of the Beatles or a boy named Charlie Brown, the Silver Age of comics (as the '60s came to be known) is so familiar to me that I never fully realized how successful the Marvel books were, or that Lee was treated like a rock star by fans and in the press. Despite the thrill of reading about the creation of the Silver Surfer and Inhumans, the resurrection from obscurity of Captain America, and countless other seminal events, even here there are portents of doom. Kirby was understandably frustrated: while he drew multiple titles for Marvel and plotted most of the issues himself, Stan Lee gave himself sole credit as "writer" and, more damningly, received all the credit in the media for creating the characters.

Ro presents both sides of this story, providing interviews Kirby gave before his death along with Lee's own comments. While the book clearly tilts in Kirby's favor, it never villifies Lee the way so many fans have done. He may have been driven by ego, money, or naivete (depending on which version you buy) to take more credit than he deserved, but the book leaves no doubt whatsoever that there couldn't have been a Marvel Universe without Lee's contributions.

The latter portions of Tales to Astonish assume a less heady, more somber tone as Kirby defects from Marvel to DC, where he's better paid but treated just as shabbily, then back to Marvel in the mid-'70s, only to discover he's now considered a dinosaur. The younger, hipper artists who have replaced Kirby regard his work as antiquated and silly, and resent the free rein he's given to invent some truly obscure series that sell poorly. The later developments aren't entirely depressing -- for instance, Kirby receives his single biggest paycheck from DC when they turn some of his creations into a toy line in the '80s, and he goes on to develop animation properties like Thundarr the Barbarian for Hanna-Barbera -- but Kirby's fall from grace, ongoing legal struggles with Marvel, and failing health cast the tail-end of the book in shadow. One can only wonder how things might have gone had Marvel simply given Kirby the credit he craved -- and clearly deserved -- along with financial remuneration for inventing or designing nearly all of its flagship characters. But so it goes for artists working under the crunching gears of megalithic corporations.

Despite these darker sections, the dominant emotion Tales to Astonish stirred within me was awe. Lee and Kirby were comic book gods, and their creations were to the staid superhero genre what Elvis and the Beatles were to rock 'n' roll. The real Jack Kirby was every bit as colorful as his characters. Tales to Astonish at last gives him his due -- and finally, after far too long, made one adult comic reader a fan.

• Read more about this book