Sept. 30, 2025 - 9:00am
What does it take to earn the moniker, King of Comics? For Jack Kirby it was six decades creating iconic superheroes and hundreds more fascinating characters in every genre: western, crime, horror, science fiction and even romance. Some of his most famous superheroes include Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man, Black Panther, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. But there was also Agatha Harkness, Big Barda and Hela, Queen of the Dead, all popular in their own comics universes.
Kirby’s impact on visual culture has been felt in the fields of comics, fashion, popular music and fine art, as well as across multiple billion-dollar film franchises. His impact inspired Ben Saunders, English professor and co-director of the Comics and Cartoon Studies minor at University of Oregon, and Patrick Reed, a pop-culture curator to develop an exhibition about Kirby and his work at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The exhibition, “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity,” received excellent reviews and multiple recommendations as a must-see event, including from “Time Out Los Angeles.”
“I am really proud of this exhibition. I think it’s one of the most important things I have ever achieved professionally,” said Saunders. “To see it reviewed in such places as ‘The Hollywood Reporter,’ ‘Variety’ and ‘Spin’ — that’s definitely not an everyday occurrence in my world, or even in the larger world of museum exhibitions.”
“AND I got to meet Jack’s daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter during the opening,” he added.
Saunders is back at the UO teaching while the exhibition remains open through March 1, 2026. He took some time to answer some questions about Kirby’s influence on culture and what made him worthy of a curated exhibition. He also reflected on Kirby’s influence on him.
Jack Kirby is an influential artist and storyteller. How has he influenced you in your life and your work?
Kirby got his fingerprints all over my brain when I was very young. I first encountered his work in British reprints of American comics. I learned about the existence of places like New York City from reading Kirby’s Marvel comics, and I know this influenced my decision to come to the United States to get my PhD. The first time I visited that great city I was slightly disappointed that there was no Baxter Building (the skyscraper home of the Fantastic Four in Kirby’s comics).
I only realized a few years ago that the America I wanted to live in didn’t exist outside of Kirby’s imagination — that it was KIRBY’S America that I wanted to discover.
Today, Kirby continues to inspire me as a kind of emblematic figure of the creative imagination. I admire his naïve humanism — by which I mean his deep belief in the fundamental similarity and connectedness of all human beings, regardless of gender, creed or color. I admire his self-conscious investment in the idea that anyone could be a superhero — co-creating the Black Panther in 1966, co-creating the first superhero mom in the character of Susan Storm Richards, leaning into the idea of superpowers as a metaphor for difference in his co-creation of the X-Men and the Incredible Hulk. His life-long detestation of fascism, rooted in his experiences in World War II, is also pretty damn inspiring.
It's genuinely scandalous that an artist of such vision and reach should be so comparatively obscure.
— Ben Saunders, professor and exhibition curator
Where did the idea come from to do an exhibition of Jack Kirby’s work? How did you partner with Patrick Reed on the exhibition?
I’ve wanted to curate a career spanning exhibition dedicated to Kirby for over a decade — ever since I first realized that there had never been a major retrospective devoted to this great American artist held in an accredited American museum. Honestly, it’s still shocking to me that Patrick and I were the first people to curate a show like this. Kirby isn’t just a great comics artist. In my opinion, he’s one of the greatest American artists of the last 100 years, in any medium. His influence is enormous and crosses multiple media — from the fine arts to cinema to music to literary fiction — there are major creators in all those different fields who will gladly acknowledge the influence of his work, his sense of design and his artistic sensibility. He was the main creative figure behind the visual design and early adventures of characters and concepts that are now globally familiar — the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Black Panther, Captain America, the Hulk, the X-Men — the list just goes on and on. He was also a key progenitor in the development of romance comics, crime comics and western comics; he even created a remarkable work of memoir. Most homes in America probably have an item stamped or embossed with a Kirby design — a lunch box, a T-shirt, a pair of pajamas, a toy, a cup or mug.
It's genuinely scandalous that an artist of such vision and reach should be so comparatively obscure. I think that is a function of the fact that the larger history and practical processes of comic book production remain poorly understood by the public at large. Really, it’s an injustice that Stan Lee’s name is relatively widely known, while Kirby’s is not. I wanted to do what little I could to change that. I know Patrick feels the same way.
How do you bring the comics of Jack Kirby into the classroom, or how does his influence affect what you teach
Although Jack had a hand in pretty much every comics genre, his influence on the concept of the superhero was especially powerful. I sometimes teach an upper division literature class on the history of the superhero from 1938 to the present exploring the political and social contexts and implications of this deeply compelling form of popular fantasy. In addition to these historic “real-world” thematics, we also explore issues of form: how the design of the comics and the artistic styles associated with the genre have changed over the past eight-plus decades. Kirby’s work looms large in that class of course — particularly his initial creation of Captain America (which predates the attacks on Pearl Harbor and is best understood as a rebuttal of homegrown American Fascism as much as European Fascism). Kirby was vehemently opposed to the America First movement and the Nazi sympathizers of the German-American Bund [a German-American Nazi organization established in 1936]. He and his creative partner, Joe Simon, were inspired to create Captain America almost a year before the Pearl Harbor attacks, in a conscious rebuttal of the America First movement; and in his initial incarnation, Cap’s arch enemy, the Red Skull, is not a German, but an American businessman who hopes to profit from the European conflict.
What are your top three Jack Kirby stories?
The so-called “Galactus trilogy” in the pages of the Fantastic Four addresses existential questions about the nature of good and evil while also never forgetting it’s an all-ages comic book. So that would be high on my list. But I really just like Kirby as a stylist — as a visual artist — as much as a storyteller and creator of memorable characters. I could pick almost any double-page spread from his work in the 1970s — The Demon, Devil Dinosaur, Kamandi, New Gods, The Eternals — the composition, creativity and energy of those images is just astounding.
—By Jenny Brooks, College of Arts and Sciences