Review Fix chats with Comic Book Writer and Playwright Fred Van Lente, who discusses the inspiration and Kickstarter behind his new production with his wife Crystal Skillman, “King Kirby,†a biographical look at comic book great Jack Kirby.
Set to premiere at this year’s 2014 Comic Book Theater Festival, the show will star Steven Rattazzi (The Venture Bros), Amy Lee Pearsall, Joe Mathers, Nat Cassidy and Timothy McCown Reynolds and will be directed by John Hurley.
From Press Release:
“King Kirby†tells the hysterical and heartbreaking story of artist Jack Kirby, “The King of the Comics,†who created or co-created some of your favorite heroes on the page and screen, Captain America, the Avengers, Thor, Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Iron Man, Young Romance the New Gods, Darkseid, The Demon… the list goes on and on.
From the Jewish ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side to the battlefields of France to the Senate hearings of 1950s, King Kirby is a hysterical and heartbreaking story about a man who pours his quintessentially Twentieth Century life into his comics, only to make the fateful mistake that sends him into obscurity while his creations become known to every person on Earth.
A real-life “Adventures of Kavalier & Klay,†“King Kirby†asks what happens when an artist doesn’t own his own legacy? Can he ever get it back?
Review Fix: When did this idea come to you?
Fred Van Lente: A looooooong time ago. I grew up reading the reprints of the early Marvels, and loving, but at some point — I don’t quite remember at what age — I started reading about how the comics were created, and fell in love with comics history. I was an ardent reader of The Comics Journal back in high school and college, and they had all those great old interviews with Gil Kane, and Joe Simon, and a lot of Golden Age creators, Kirby included.
Review Fix: How has Jack Kirby influenced you as a comic book writer?
Van Lente: Quite a lot, and quite literally. My love of his Marvel work, and particularly the later Fourth World stuff aside, his life became something of an obsession, which led to me working heavily on a biography, and then, because my wife is a playwright, I tried a version of the play around 2002 or so. A lot of the info in the bio/play wound up in me and Ryan Dunlavey’s Comic Book History of Comics.
That I set aside, as I was still doing comics on the side and such, became known for doing that.
Review Fix: What was the research process like?
Van Lente: In the early days, we’re talking, 1999, 2000, 2001, I scoured a lot of sources, not just in comics, but we have great resources here in New York like the Tenement Museum and I did my best to track down his service record from the Army (but failed, alas — a lot of WW2 records got lost in a VA fire in, I believe, the 1970s). But some of these folks, comics creators I mean, are some of the most interviewed people on Earth! And not just them, but their colleagues, and I got a lot of insights from folks like Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, dudes who were maybe just a little younger than Simon and Kirby and worked with them. So you get a surprisingly multi-faceted view.
Review Fix: What have you learned about yourself as a writer through this?
Van Lente: Well, I love history, and telling stories from history, that may be my favorite genre, and this is a story that I just think needs to be told, and told well. I think we’ve done a pretty good job.
Review Fix: What do you think is the script’s most-endearing quality?
Van Lente: What’s amazing about the Kirby story, even beyond the comics, is how his life hits so many hot spots of the twentieth century — Depression poverty in the Lower East Side ghetto, he fought in France in World War Two, the romance comics in the 50s, the trippy cosmic stuff in the ’60s and ’70s — so you really get to tell a story that everyone relate to, even beyond this much larger and broader and common theme of the artist against the marketplace.
Review Fix: Why should someone who has no idea who Jack Kirby is be interested in this production?
Van Lente: Everyone loves an underdog, and a person fighting against amazing odds. Kirby is a person who has to fight for respect at the end of his life, particularly in the 1980s, in his struggle to get his artwork back. He’s an interesting person in that he made all his money drawing fights, he fought in a street gang and in the army, but, the more you learn about him, he was kind of conflict-adverse. Didn’t like confrontation. Ultimately I think that cost him quite a lot.
Review Fix: What was it like to work with your wife on this project?
Van Lente: Well, to finish King Kirby’s origin story, after I had set the script aside for, literally, a decade, The Brick, which has produced Crystal a lot, started a Comic Book Theater Festival. She adapted me and Ryan’s Action Philosophers for the first one, and when the Brick decided to do another, she got the idea of dusting off my old play about Kirby. She did such a great job helping me rewrite it I insisted she get co-writer credit. And here we are.
Review Fix: What are your goals for this production?
Van Lente: Well, our first, and most obvious goal is to hit our Kickstarter reward to fundraise the production budget. Our ask is a bit less than our actual total budget, so if folks haven’t checked out the site and seen some of our awesome pledges — including a signed Comic Book History of Comics, and exclusive illustrated version of the play, a recording of the show, a great Ryan Dunlavey print.
Review Fix: How do you want it to affect people?
Van Lente: I want people to know this pop culture, it doesn’t just fall from the heavens. People make it, and they put their lives into it, and sometimes they pay a heavy price for it. It’d be nice if people left the production thinking about that.
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