Jack Kirby Way Street Naming Honors LES-Born Comic Book Artist

Look up in the sky, on the northwest corner of Essex and Delancey Streets. It’s not a bird. It’s not a plane. It’s Jack Kirby Way!

This was but one revelation of the street naming ceremony that took place on the northeast corner of Essex and Delancey Streets on May 11. Kirby, who is so revered by comic book adepts they call him “King Kirby,” grew up at 147 Essex St., thus the locale of the day’s event—give or take a short, narrow and once impossibly teeming Lower East Side block.

Reflecting Kirby’s stature, local Council Member Christopher Marte pulled together an large and passionate cast of characters, including Kirby’s professional colleagues, family members, comic book scholars and Kirby-inspired cosplay enthusiasts for the unveiling. The presence of the last group, inspired by movie adaptations of Kirby’s work, lent the ceremony more exuberance than most street naming ceremonies.

And so, for the man who created Captain America, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Silver Surfer Black Panther—this is but the short list—there came: Lisa Kirby, Jack Kirby’s daughter, and his grandchildren Tracey and Jeremy; Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief C. B. Cebulski; the renowned comic book creator Frank Miller; the legendary comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz; Director of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, Rand Hoppe; Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University Libraries, Karen Green; Kirby’s biographer, Mark Evanier; Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society, Gemma Birnbaum; and members of the family of Jim Simon, Kirby’s longtime creative partner and co-creator of “Captain America.” This too is the short list.

Explaining why Kirby commands such affection more than three decades since his death in 1994 is as difficult to explain in a few words as it’s obvious in print. If quotes like “Jack Kirby, not just to comic book art but to pop art in general is what Shakespeare is to drama” by cultural historian Roy Schwartz sound grandiloquent, that’s because, for all their ubiquity and influence, the type of comic books Kirby worked on for DC, Marvel and others occupy a space less vaunted than that of “fine art” or literature. Countering this is a newly opened—and free—exhibition, “The Jack Kirby Way,” at the Center for Jewish History at 15 W. 16th St.

Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants, Rose and Benjamin. His childhood home, a five-story tenement, was also the ground floor home of Hacker’s, an upholstered furniture manufacturer, and his neighbors, M. Katz & Sons. and Max Posnick Co., were are also furniture dealers. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood spoke Yiddish, including the Jewish gangsters. This seeped into Kirby’s work, which, in “The Fantastic Four,” included a Yiddishized “Yancy Street” gang.

Largely self-taught, Kirby emulated newspaper cartoonists, and worked various staff drawing jobs under pseudonyms in the mid-to-late 1930s. In 1940, Kirby and his editor, Joe Simon, created the patriotic superhero, Captain America, which was a smash hit when released in 1941. Kirby was drafted into the Army 1943, serving in Europe. Kirby’s subsequent career in the roiling world of comic book publishing is too complicated and convoluted to summarize except to emphasize how, even as he was often denied full credit for his work (an occuptational hazard), Kirby’s brilliance revealed itself time and again, including a remarkable 1974-1975 science-fiction series titled “OMAC (One Man Army Corps).” “It’s uncanny how much Kirby foresaw about the world that’s arrived,” critic Harry Siegel observed fifty years later.

“My heart is full knowing that we are officially unveiling Jack Kirby Way on the Lower East Side,” said Council Member Christopher Marte before the event. “Jack Kirby turned a childhood on these streets into stories that gave hope, strength, and imagination to millions around the world. I grew up just around the corner from Essex and Delancey, so this neighborhood is not just history to me, it is home. Honoring Jack Kirby here feels deeply right, and it ensures that future generations will know that some of the most powerful stories in American culture were born on these streets.”

Said Kirby himself in an interview, his New York accent as rich as the best matzoh ball soup on Delancey Street, “My artwork connects with the ordinary person, and they can understand it very easily. And I’ve always meant it to be so. I’ve never confined my art to a particular section of humanity. I love people in general.”