How Jack Kirby and Walt Disney Broke Free from the Funny Pages

Dan Sanchez
6 min readAug 26, 2017

--

Nothing seems very momentous about the “funny pages”: little more than doodles on page D7 of your morning paper, good for nothing more than a chuckle.

But the “comic strip” gave birth to the “comic book,” including its most prestigious variation, the graphic novel. And print “cartoons” also gave birth to animated “cartoons,” including the animated feature film.

Both early comic books and early cartoons hewed closely to the forms of their funny page predecessors, in part because the first comic book creators and animators were former comic strip cartoonists.

It took two bold, creative innovators to free their respective genres from the straits of the comic strip panel and take full advantage of their mediums: Jack Kirby and Walt Disney.

Blowing Up the Comic Strip

In Kirby: King of Comics, Mark Evanier wrote that comic books:

“…started as reprints of newspaper strips. Someone would repaste the panels — not always in sequence — and the publisher would offer sixty-four pages in color for a dime. The magazines were so successful that all the popular strips were quickly locked up.”

When these reprints proved popular, publishers and creators began creating comic stories specifically for the magazine format. As Evanier related:

“None of the first comic book artists could match Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for anatomy or Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant for sheer brilliance of drawing, even when tracing them directly. But many of the artists could tell a quicker, punchier story in pictures . . . and their work, designed for the comic book page, seemed more organic. Stories weren’t reassembled from daily strips, and therefore weren’t endlessly recapping what someone said six panels earlier.”

Nonetheless, Evanier continued, in the 1930s…

“The form hadn’t quite found itself. No one had yet really thought how to design a comic book page in any way other than to replicate the reconfigured newspaper reprints. But then, Jack Kirby hadn’t started drawing comic books yet. He did in 1938, arriving at the studio of Eisner and Iger about the same time the first issue of Action Comics was arriving on newsstands. (…) Jack felt instantly at home in the surroundings, and especially with the page format. Newspaper strips were small and confining, and they advanced their storylines in halting baby steps. Then as later, he thought in big pictures.”

Kirby’s panel-penetrating style first came into its own when he co-created, along with Joe Simon, Captain America in 1940:

“Simon and Kirby did ten issues of Captain America and super-hero comics were never the same. This is what Harvey Kurtzman, who would later invent MAD Magazine, had to say about what happened there:

‘Kirby was the critical element in the Simon and Kirby partnership. He was perfect for the medium. He stripped everything down to essentials. His understanding of mass and movement was uncanny, filling his pictures with so much action that they bulged beyond the borders of the panels. There was such fury and energy in the work that it couldn’t be contained. Kirby was an absolute force. Before Simon and Kirby, the super hero was, in a sense, realistically oriented. Despite the characters’ superhuman powers, they were not drawn in action in ways that suggested how extraordinary they were. When Simon and Kirby drew Captain America though, they depicted his super-action through opposing lines that clashed and exploded all over the panels. Alongside of Simon and Kirby’s work, everything else was static, pale, anemic.’

Joe and Jack were way out in front in making comic books different from strips. They had a bigger canvas and they used it, designing by the page instead of by the panel and forging a new style for a new medium. Before them, almost everyone drawing adventure comics had been replicating five syndicated strip artists — Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Roy Crane, Milton Caniff, or Chester Gould. Even Joe and Jack had mimicked all five at times. But now they were Simon and Kirby, and others would want to be, as well. Gil Kane, who would become one of the top illustrators, would remark, ‘They were the first comic book artists to inspire others with their drawing.’”

Cartoons That Move and Are Moving

A big moment in the rise of animation out of cartooning was 1910, when Winsor McCay integrated animation into a vaudeville act.

As Neal Gabler wrote in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination:

“McCay had been an illustrator and cartoonist for the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune and then the Enquirer before defecting to the New York Herald and Evening Telegram, where he created several comic strips, most famously “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which brought him national fame and a vaudeville contract. Inspired by a “flip book” that his son brought home, in which riffling the pages set figures in motion, he converted “Nemo” into a short animation to be shown during his act. By the time he made his second film, How a Mosquito Operates, in 1912, he was declaring animation a “new school of art that will revolutionize the entire field,” and when he drew “Gertie the Dinosaur” two years later, also for his vaudeville act, he accelerated that revolution by laying, in the words of one animation historian, the “foundations of character animation, the art of delineating a character’s personality through a unique style of movement.” Where McCay led, many illustrators and cartoonists followed, until animation gradually emerged as a new film genre emphasizing characters rather than magic. Late in 1914 or early 1915 a French-Canadian illustrator named Raoul Barré and a longtime magazine and newspaper artist named John Randolph Bray opened the first animation studios in New York, and within a few years they had at least a dozen rivals there hoping to reap the profits of this novelty.”

And yet, when Disney began dabbling in animation in 1920, the field still had a long way to go before it would break the comic strip mold and come to life:

“Drawings and movement were rudimentary, in part because animators had to feel their way along a trail that had yet to be blazed. Most of them were eager young print cartoonists like Walt who had no training in animating figures; at best they studied books — there were a handful of them in the postwar period — that purported to explain how to make pictures move. “Animators were scarce,” Grim Natwick, an early cartoonist, recalled. “There was no one to tell them how to do it. They sharpened a fist full of pencils, sat down at a drawing board and started animating.” And what was true of the drawing was equally true of the stories the drawings told. Based primarily on familiar comic strips, early animations had no more narrative refinement than a day’s installment of those strips — no real attempt to tell a story, much less create an arc.”

Thanks to Disney’s relentless drive for excellence and innovation, his studio pioneered many narrative, artistic, and technical advances that continuously distanced the art form from its comic strip forebears.

A major figure in this evolution was Donald Graham, who in 1932 became the founding instructor of the in-studio “great Disney Art School,” as he called it. Gabler writes:

“He had no training in animation himself, but it wasn’t animation that Walt wanted him to teach. Rather, he taught a group of crusty New York animators, former newspaper cartoonists, sometime art students, and talented dabblers the art of figurative drawing without, said one animator, imposing a single style on them. He was laying a foundation, teaching them how to draw, really draw, which meant, as one animator came to realize, that ‘he was single-handedly attacking the traditional concept of animation as simply moving comic strips’ and trading it for realism.”

All of these advances converged and culminated in the renowned, groundbreaking 1937 animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

The Power of the Creative Individual

Jack Kirby, who was not only a dazzling artist but a genius inventor of characters and stories, was, even more than Stan Lee, the principal architect of the “Marvel Universe,” as well as many of the most powerful ideas in the “DC Universe.” And of course Walt Disney and the company he founded generated some of the most iconic characters and stories of the past 90 years. Thus in a sense it might be fitting that Kirby’s Marvel Universe and the Disney Universe recently merged.

And it all started when two creative individuals decided to break the mold.

--

--