Granted, the language Kirby uses wasn't elegant. Kirby also managed to voice his displeasure with stereotypical Asian characters. Remember, in my day, drawing an Asian was drawing Fu Manchu - that’s the only Asian they knew. Then I began to realize that there was a whole range of human differences. And here I am a leading cartoonist and I wasn’t doing a black. It suddenly dawned on me - believe me, it was for human reasons - I suddenly discovered nobody was doing blacks. My first friend was a black! And here I was ignoring them because I was associating with everybody else. I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers. KIRBY: I came up with the Black Panther because I realized I had no blacks in my strip. GROTH: How did you come up with the Black Panther?
And one day, he realized he was ignoring how important it was for him, and for the comic book industry, to reflect humanity (emphasis Vox's): In the spirit of remembering Kirby, writer Saladin Ahmed tweeted and pointed to a 1990 interview with the Comics Journal, where Kirby explained that he was compelled to create the superhero Black Panther because the default had always been white characters. More characters like Kamala is what Kirby would have wanted.
Marvel series featuring Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager. And while it can get ugly, sexist, and racist, there's plenty of good to come out of this battle. The past few years in the comic book industry have been underscored by a struggle for more diversity. And there are still people fighting battles today in the spirit of Kirby's legacy. A massive part of this legacy was that Kirby was always telling stories - through his heroes like the X-Men, the Thing, the Hulk - of being an outsider and becoming a hero despite living in a world that's seemingly out to get you. From his iconic stories and characters to his contentious relationship with Marvel, Kirby's legacy is a rich and memorable one. Over the past week, comic book enthusiasts have been celebrating the late artist Jack Kirby's birthday by remembering the impact he had on the industry.
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