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

From Booklist
Jack Kirby is arguably the most influential comic-book artist of all time: In the early 1940s he cocreated Captain America and drew dozens of other superheroes, essentially creating the template for the genre. But his best-known work comes from the 1960s, when he and writer Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and most of the rest of the innovative Marvel Comics cast. Kirby's rough-and-tumble Lower East Side childhood and maverick approach to his art must have seemed a promising subject to Ronin, whose previous books have been on rap music. He paints a colorful portrait--the real-life analog of Kavalier and Clay--of the comic book's early days, and his accounts of Kirby's acrimonious split with Lee and battle with Marvel over ownership of his original drawings show that the industry remained cutthroat. Ultimately, Ronin's treatment is more dutiful than inspired (oh, for some of Kirby's fervor!) and marred by minor errors. The definitive Kirby biography is yet to come; until it arrives, Ronin's is a useful, readable stopgap. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
The spectacular life and times of Jack Kirby, the legendary forefather of American comic books.

For fifty years, Jack Kirby drew more pages than any other comic book artist. As talented as he was prolific, Kirby was responsible for many of the most well-known and beloved superheroes in popular culture.

With his first writing partner Joe Simon, he created Captain America, DC Comics's Sandman, and the lucrative genre of the romance comic. In the 1960s, Kirby paired with Stan Lee to develop a pantheon of heroes that included, among others, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Silver Surfer, and the Inhumans. Together with Lee, this artist and writer forever changed the American comic book by introducing angst-ridden heroes, sympathetic villains, and a dynamic visual style that has influenced every artist who followed.

The inspiration behind The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Jack Kirby has been hailed by Wizard magazine as "Without any doubt...the single most important creator in the History of American Comic Books." In Tales to Astonish, Ronin Ro chronicles Kirby's poverty-stricken origins in the Lower East Side, his early commercial triumphs and failures, his renowned partnership with Stan Lee, his continuing artistic innovations (the production department hated him for pasting photographs into his pages), and his lengthy legal battles with Marvel comics over the ownership of his original art. An insightful portrait of one of its most enduring-and overlooked-artists, Tales to Astonish is also a lively, novelistic account of the comic book industry, from its inauspicious origins to its sensational successes.



About the Author
Ronin Ro is the author of Gangsta: Merchandising the Rhymes of Violence, the award-winning international bestseller Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records, and the novel Street Sweeper (soon to be a major motion picture). He has written for Vanity Fair, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Herald, Playboy, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV. He lives in upstate New York.



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Hip-hop author Ro (Have Gun Will Travel, 1998, etc.) considers the frisky comic-books industry in a history of the people of Marvel and DC Comics. His subjects might well have sprung from the fiction of Tom De Haven and Michael Chabon or the Bristol Board of Will Eisner and Ben Katchor, though one particular genius gets much of the author's attention. With sincere admiration, Ro relates the life of Jack Kirby (1917-94), considered by comic-book connoisseurs to be king of the art form. With his sometime colleague, sometime nemesis, the ubiquitous Stan Lee, looking over his shoulder, Kirby penciled thousands upon thousands of pages filled with superheroes, puissant villains, and aliens from strange worlds, all bursting their panels. Occasionally with others, but mostly alone and chomping on his Roi-Tan stogie, King Kirby created, among others, The Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Spiderman, Silver Surfer, The Hulk, Dr. Strange, Sgt. Fury, and Capt. Victory (forget Elasti-Girl and Negative Man). At Marvel, Lee shared bylines while tending to the marketing; Kirby created characters and dialogue. When the relationship seemed untenable, Jack moved to DC, Superman's home, where the characters lacked inner life. Despite their primary colors, the Marvel heroes Kirby created had flaws, doubts, and personalities. Concentrating heavily on descriptions of character and plot, Ro offers less material on the basic production of comic books as the plot was made palpable in pencil, inking, coloring, and lettering, then passed on to production and distribution. (Presumably, fans know all they want on this aspect.) Ultimately, it's the story of Kirby, his family, Stan Lee, the inkers, and the suits, not to mentionpurloined artwork and threats of lawyers. With Kirby's passing, it may also be read as a tale of the twilight of some of yesterday's superheroes as they are recreated in the movies. A chronicle of people, who, bit by bit, 64 pages for a dime, influenced our culture greatly. Too bad there aren't any illustrations. Agent: Caroline Carney


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