A Minor Deviation...

I know I said I'd be talking about Ion and the way DC wants to brick on their readership, but something struck me tonight that I wanted to get off my chest (and no, DC didn't put it there), so I'm straying from the plan.

I just picked up a book called Tales to Astonish by Ronin Ro, and while I'm still not that deep into it, it's a really interesting read. The book focuses on Jack Kirby's career in comics with a heavy emphasis on his relationship with Stan Lee over the years. It's a little jarring in that the book, at least early on, jumps from point to point a little too quick, and a lot of the "facts" are obviously based on recollection and anecdotes, but it's very interesting nonetheless.

The thing that struck me as I was reading it and wanting to go out and find more books on the early history of the medium is that we are at a time in history where, one by one, the people who pioneered this little corner of entertainment are dying off. I had the amazing fortune to meet Jack Kirby not long before he passed away, and he was a very warm, genuine man who really enjoyed talking to people who enjoyed him. We actually spent quite a bit of time in conversation, most probably because it had nothing to do with comics! My Grandfather was born in Brooklyn, also a Jewish tailor's son, not long after Kirby was born in Manhattan. They served in the army around the same time and both worked on not working (Kirby would climb into a plane's undercarriage and bang on the metal in order to sound busy).

We only stopped talking when his wife reminded him he had somewhere to be, and while it was probably just a conversation for him, I will likely never forget the privilege I had that day. Even now I remember being choked up in the waiting room of the dentist's office when I was thumbing through a weekly magazine and saw that Jack Kirby had passed away. This wasn't an artist who drew funnybooks, and not even a man who helped to create entire noodles in the kugel of American culture, this was someone who I had met and shared some time with, someone who came before me and had so much to offer, someone who reminded me of my own history.

I'm really struck with a sense of sadness at the thought that the men behind so many of our cultural icons, moreso now than ever before, are leaving us for the hereafter. Next time I'll talk a bit about someone else who's no longer with us and the amazing experience a geeky kid had thanks to his kindness. I think this will end up being a three or four parter, so for the one person who's reading, if you were waiting for me to hate on Ion, sorry about that.