Skirball Cultural Center Showcases Jack Kirby’s Singular Vision of Heroism and Humanity

When comic book artist Jack Kirby drew Captain America punching out Hitler on the cover of the first issue of Captain America Comics, it was the shot heard around the world. The bombing of Pearl Harbor hadn’t occurred yet, and the U.S. was wavering over whether or not to join the fight in Europe. That’s when the anti-interventionist German American Bund staged a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, the largest ever held on American soil. The comic book’s first issue appeared in December 1940 and sold over a million copies.

“This was meant to inspire an intervention,” University of Oregon professor and curator Ben Saunders tells Observer about the comic book cover, part of his new show, “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity” at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center, which was co-curated by Patrick A. Reed and organized by the museum’s deputy director Michelle Urton. “If Kirby had died at the end of the 1950s, he would still be remembered as one of the most vital figures of early comics. But he has this great second act to his career when he moves to Marvel in the sixties and develops all of the major Marvel heroes. And then a third act where he moves to DC and later goes independent.”

Although he didn’t invent Superman (that distinction belongs to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), he damn near invented all the rest—indelible characters like The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, The X-Men, The Black Panther, Mister Miracle, The Incredible Hulk and The New Gods.

Once the U.S. entered the war, Kirby put down his pen and signed up. He was assigned to Company F of the 11th Infantry (his uniform is on display) and landed on the beach at Normandy in the days following D-Day, fighting under the command of General George S. Patton.

“He saw all kinds of suffering,” says Saunders. “He saw people who had not had food. There’s a vivid story about a starving dog. He has a story about killing a soldier with his hands.”

After 1946, the appetite for caped crusaders began to wane. Instead of reprinting comics from newspapers, publishers started commissioning original work, and the genre became flooded with detectives, warlocks, aliens and cuddly critters.

“Their initial big hit after returning from World War II is the romance genre,” says Saunders. “There were no romance comics prior to then. They actually invented the genre.” It coincided with the emerging independence of women, many of whom were tested in the job market during the war and found a new sense of self-confidence. Movie stars like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck made films like Now, Voyager, Mildred Pierce and The Gay Sisters, targeted directly at women. “You see the audience expanding here,” Urton says of postwar comics. “They’re starting to market to young women, which is not traditionally the market for comic books.”

Kirby’s early work featured rough-hewn figures and intricate page layouts that captured action in ways that penetrated panel borders, creating a sense of uncontained havoc. After the war, he adapted a more naturalistic aesthetic with panel layouts set in grids of six per page. Figures took on more conventional proportions, and perspective became more naturalistic. “In the early fifties, when the material becomes more sophisticated, there is that strong backlash, and the adult themes are banned. If you think about how science fiction was regarded in the thirties, or crime noir, they weren’t seen as art genres,” offers Saunders.

By the time Kirby arrived at Timely (renamed Marvel in the 1960s), they were producing a reduced line of romances, westerns and B-movie-inspired monster books. The editor, a former assistant to Simon and Kirby from the 1940s named Stan Lee (a mashup of his real name—Stanley Martin Lieber), was eager to be reunited.

“When Kirby comes back, the kid he remembers as the office gopher has become editor-in-chief,” laughs Saunders. He and Lee enjoyed a sometimes smooth and other times rocky relationship, which, over the years, fed the rumor mill. “There was a tension over who was getting credit and a tension over money. But neither Jack nor Stan owned the material they created. People say things like Stan Lee ripped off Jack Kirby and it’s just not true because Stan didn’t own his material either.”

Between 1958 and 1962, they produced dozens of monster stories starring beasts with names like Bombu, Goom, Googam, Gorgilla, Groot, Moomba, Oog and Rorgg. As superheroes made a comeback, Kirby and Lee borrowed elements from their earlier sci-fi stories, using the space race as a central plot device and pitting The Thing, Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman and the Human Torch against space invaders and gargantuan otherworldly beasts. Characters exhibited emotional complexity and bickered the way coworkers sometimes do, while grappling with quotidian challenges like paying the rent.

Kirby didn’t create Spider-Man but drew the cover that introduced him (based on a likeness by fellow artist Steve Ditko that was rejected by Lee). The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Sergeant Nick Fury (whose race changed from white to Black over the years), The X-Men, Ant-Man, The Wasp and many others took a bow in the years leading up to 1967. The Avengers #1 brought several of these characters together in the earliest stirrings of the Marvel Universe, and revived a war-traumatized version of Captain America in The Avengers #4, reflecting the nation’s psychic dread surrounding the Vietnam War.

“It’s a massive amount of work he’s generated,” says Saunders of this particularly fecund period. “His pre-war work we think of as juvenile, and there’s something more self-consciously cartoony about their features. In the late forties into the fifties, his style becomes more naturalistic. He moves closer to realism and realistic perspective in the establishing shots.”

Bowing in the July 1966 issue of Fantastic Four #52 was The Coal Tiger, King of Wakanda, better known as Black Panther. Wakanda, with its cutting-edge technology, paved the way for a movement that remains vital today—Afrofuturism. On display at the Skirball is Black Panther’s costume from the film as well as reproductions showing the first images of Wakanda.

“He abandons realism with more confidence. There’s a period at Marvel when he says, ‘Forget all that. I’m going to become an abstract expressionist,’” notes Saunders. Works like The Dream Machine and Jacob Wrestling With the Angel represent a late-career departure for the aging artist. “If late Kandinsky had drawn a superhero comic, it would look like that.”

Kirby’s formal embrace of collage led to comics like no other on the market. He started cutting out images from a stack of Sunday supplements and magazines he kept for visual memory. Jacob and the Angel is an example of pure Kirby. Tech becomes divinity. Chariots of the Gods is definitely a book Jack read,” Saunders says. “He was interested in the notion that early humanity could have had encounters with technically advanced aliens they would mistake for God.” In 1969, Kirby moved to DC Comics, relocating his family from New York to Southern California, where he spent the remainder of his life. During this period, he abandoned realism for fantastical world-building in independent works like his comic adaptation of the sci-fi film classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Design elements like costumes and weaponry illustrate the triumph of form over function with things like winged helmets, horned masks and decorative armor. His frames became rococo in their ornamental crowding, with the work spilling out of the book and into the real world in costume designs he did for a UC Santa Cruz production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, one of which was realized especially for the Skirball show. But his first passion remained comic books. “He loved being a comic guy,” says Saunders. “He never lost faith in what the medium could do. Jack was a great artist who happened to draw comics.”

“Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity” is at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center through March 1, 2026.

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