The Four Color Media Monitor

The Avondhu wrote about Jack Kirby's history, beginning with his co-creating Captain America in the Golden Age along with Joe Simon. And along the way, they make an important note about how some local politicians during WW2 stood up for Kirby and company in those dark days:

Whatever Cap lacked in originality, though, he more than made up in audacity. Simon and Kirby, two first-generation Jewish immigrant kids, went for broke: the cover of Captain America Number 1 – cover dated March 1941 but released in December 1940 – showed Cap socking a real-life super-villain on the jaw. A year before the United States entered World War II, Captain America clocked Adolf Hitler. It sold a million copies.

American Nazis, thin-skinned cowards then too, didn’t like that, and the Timely offices soon received a torrent of death threats. Years later, Joe Simon recounted that the NYPD stood guard at the door as a phone call was put through from New York Mayor LaGuardia, a long-time critic of Hitler.

“I was incredulous as I picked up the phone,” Simon wrote, “but there was no mistaking the shrill voice. ‘You boys over there are doing a good job,’ the voice squeaked, ‘The City of New York will see that no harm will come to you’.”

Today, it's a far different picture, and not because security at the building would be lacking. It's because today, there's long been apologists for jihadism who'd never offer even the slightest bit of encouragement to keep plying your trade without fear of evil and censorship, and worst, if Kirby and Simon were around today and tried to pitch the idea of a superhero fighting against Islamic terrorists, they'd be flatly rejected, even blacklisted. Smaller publishers probably wouldn't accept their ideas either, there'd be no Martin Goodman to back them up, and not even the mayor of New York - currently Bill deBlasio - would bother to back them up. That's how far we've all fallen in the reign of decadence, and that's also what led to the tragic murders at Charlie Hebdo over their Muhammed cartoons 2 years ago.

When they get to the part about Kirby's legal issues with Marvel over the rights to his artwork, they say:

Through the 1980s, Kirby worked in animation and for smaller comics companies, as well as doing occasional work for DC. In 1984, he tried to reclaim the estimated 13,000 pages of original artwork he had produced for Marvel. Marvel demanded he sign a contract admitting that everything he created for Marvel was work-for-hire.

“I wouldn’t cooperate with the Nazis,” Kirby fumed, “and I won’t cooperate with them. If I allow them to do this to me, I’m allowing them to do this to other people.”

And here, what's sad is that today, both Marvel and DC are, in a manner of speaking, cooperating with Islamists, something even Kirby never did in his time, and associating themselves with all sorts of leftist propagandists with no genuine respect for Kirby or Simon, no matter their political standings. Just a sad portrait of how a once fine medium was lost to political correctness, and how past masters have had their creations desecrated in the process.

Labels: Captain America, dc comics, good artists, islam and jihad, marvel comics, politics, terrorism