“Sue Storm commands the light, Johnny’s flames burn blazing bright, Ben is rockin’ the world with might, and Reed bends science left and right!” — From The Fantastic Four First Steps, written by Michael Giacchino.

Like most Ashkenazi-Americans, some if not all of my forefathers lived in New York City’s Lower East Side when they got off the boat from Europe. Specifically, their city of embarkment was Liverpool, but that was during a different sort of British Invasion.

Back in the late 19th Century, the Lower East Side was a land of tenements and slums. The immigrant groups of the time — Jews, Italians, Asians, Croatians — lived in dangerously overcrowded conditions with, maybe, one toilet per floor to serve a dozen families squeezed into ramshackle subdivided apartments too small for Clark Kent to change costumes. Kids poured out onto the streets to play among the rats, the garbage and the horse manure and, later, to run errands for mobsters only a bit older than themselves.

It wasn’t that the rents were cheap. I mean, they were compared to those in the rest of Manhattan, but they were higher than most slum dwellers could afford for any length of time. However, they stayed in the neighborhood where they could speak in their native tongues, maintain some of their cultural heritage, and, in the case of the children, annoy their parents.

This is where Jack Kirby grew up. Even a casual glance at Lower East Side history would reveal how that neighborhood formed Jack’s worldview, his need to tell stories that start out on his Dead End streets but wind up in overwhelming dimensions of unimaginable fantasy. Jack Kirby, with the power of his imagination, his heritage, and his ability to squeeze a ton of energy into a shoebox, conquered those limitations while showing us we have the wherewithal to overcome those very limitations imposed by society and circumstance. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: The King’s Heritage” →