Free Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Curtiss, et al., who with Joe Simon would create Captain America and, after a noteworthy partnership with Simon, go on to co-create, with Stan Lee, such Marvel Comics mainstays as The Fantastic Four , The X-Men , The Silver Surfer , and The Hulk . Only nineteen when he began working for Eisner & Iger, Kirby had obvious talent but was still learning the ropes, penciling and inking whatever he was assigned. He legally changed his name to Jack Kirby after he’d put in his short stint with Eisner. In time, his nickname would be “King,” as in “the King of Comics.”
    One of his most memorable moments in the shop, recounted in Eisner’s The Dreamer , involved Kirby saving Eisner’s hide during a brief but intense visit from a Mafia thug sent to the Eisner & Iger studio to strong-arm Eisner in a dispute that would have been funny had it not been so serious. The misunderstanding began shortly after Eisner & Iger had moved to a new location. Eisner, disappointed with the building’s towel service, had contacted the towel firm and inferred that he was thinking of switching to a better, cheaper service. As Eisner told the story, he was unaware at the time that the Mob controlled the business—thus the visit from the huge, imposing, walking stereotype dressed in a black shirt, black suit, and white tie, complete with a broken nose and shoulders that looked to be about two ax handles wide.
    The strong-arm took what he considered to be a reasonable approach at the beginning of his conversation with Bill Eisner and Jerry Iger.
    “Look, we don’t want to have no trouble with you,” he told them. “We want everything to go nice, see? You tell me what your problem is, and we’ll try to fix it.”
    Eisner responded by saying that he wanted another service, that there were other places to call.
    Negotiations broke down; some shouting ensued. The visitor insisted that his boss controlled the building’s services and that was all there was to it.
    Jack Kirby, sitting at his drawing table and listening in on the dispute, had heard enough. He stormed up to the front of the room and confronted the thug, even though he was a foot shorter than the other guy.
    “Look, we don’t want any crap from you,” he shouted. “We don’t like your goddamned towel service. Now get the hell out of here.”
    For Kirby, this wasn’t a show. The short, stocky artist was a wrecking ball with attitude. He’d been raised in a rugged neighborhood on New York’s Lower East Side, where aggression was the preemptive strike you took against the guy capable of beating the hell out of you and discretion was a word used by kids attending the private schools. Kirby loved movies, especially action pictures, and even his first cartoon job, working as an animator on the Popeye cartoons produced by Max Fleischer, was all about the little guy gaining justice by standing up to the big brute. Kirby might not have been big, but he was legitimately tough. He wasn’t about to sit by and watch his bosses be intimidated by some Mafia muscle.
    The thug left without further incident.
    “He comes back again, call me,” Kirby instructed Eisner. “I’ll take care of him.”
    Years later, Eisner could see the humor in the incident and in the way Kirby had taken on the thug in his own David and Goliath scenario. “Jack was a little fellow,” Eisner said. “He thought he was John Garfield the actor! Very, very tough.”
    In changing his name, Jack Kirby was in no way unusual in the comic book business. Like Hollywood actors, comic book artists changed their names to mask their ethnic or Jewish backgrounds. If comics were a ghetto, as Eisner repeatedly suggested throughout his career, its artists were perfect inhabitants. Many, like Eisner, had come from European stock, lived impoverished childhoods in tough neighborhoods, barely survived the Depression, and studiously worked on their art, only to discover that the better-paying jobs were closed to people with their