Comics Artists

"Rachkovsky: That is Sergius Nilus!"

"Nilus: This is a program of Jewish world conquest…proof of who is behind this revolution!"

"1905 Tsar Nicholas II made inept efforts to mollify his angry people by granting basic liberties and allowing a parliament (Duma), which he kept dissolving. Meanwhile he ruthlessly suppressed the people’s rising. Royal troops fired ona peaceful march of workers in St. Petersburg on January 9, known as Bloody Sunday. Anti-Jewish pogroms were rampant. The Russian edition, published by Dr. Nilus, of the “Protocols of Zion” was widely circulated. Monarchists frequently read it aloud to illiterate peasants. 1914 The start of World War I led to Russian military defeats. A failing economy brought about terrible civilian suffering. Loyalists openly spoke about a “Jewish plot”. Food riots, strikes, and the tsar’s panicky dissolution of the Fourth Duma exploded into revolution. By November, the Bolsheviks (the revolutionary faction of the former Social Democratic workers’ party) had seized control of the government. Royalist Russians began a civil warand were defeated. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and was executed, along with his family, by Bolsheviks in 1918. Russian aristocrats fled Russia and dispersed throughout Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East. There they settled as expatriates. Most had little work experience.In order to earn money, they frequently sold valuables. Some of these items provided information on the Russian use of anti-Semitic literature."

"1920 The Times London, Saturday, May 8, 1920. “The Jewish peril.” A disturbing pamphlet Call for inquiry. (From a correspondent.) The Times has not as yet noticed this singular little book. Its diffusion is, however, increasing, and its reading is likely to perturb the thinking public. Never before have a race and a creed been accused of a more sinister conspiracy. We in this country, who live in good fellowship with numerous representatives of Jewry, may well ask that some authoritative criticism should deal with it., and either destroy the ugly “Semitic” body or assign their proper place to the insidious allegations of this kind of literature. In spite of the urgency of impartial and exhaustive criticism, the pamphlet has been allowed, so far, to pass almost unchallenged. The Jewish Press announced, it is true, that the anti-semitism of the “Jewish Peril” was going to be exposed. But save for an unsatisfactory article in the March 5 issue of the ‘’Jewish Guardian’’ and for an almost equally unsatisfactory article in the March 5 issue of contribution to the ‘’Nation’’ of March 27, this exposure is yet to come. The article of the ‘’Jewish Guardian’’ is unsatisfactory, because it deals mainly with the personality of the author of the book in which the pamphlet is embodied, with Russian reactionary propaganda, and the Russian secret police. It does not touch the substance of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” The purely Russian side of the book and its fervid “Orthodoxy.” Is not its most interesting feature. Its author-Professor S. Nilus-who was a minor official in the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, had, in all likelihood, opportunities of access to many archives and unpublished documents. On the other hand, the world-wide issue raised by the “Protocols” which he incorporated in his book and are now translated into English as “The Jewish Peril,” cannot fail not only to interest, but to preoccupy. What are the these of the “Protocols” with which, in the absence of public criticism, British readers have to grapple alone and unaided?"

"Have we, by straining every fiber of our national body, escaped a “Pax Germanica” only to fall into a “Pax Judaica”? The “Elders of Zion,” as represented in their “Protocols” are by no means kinder taskmasters than William II. And his henchmen would have been. All these questions, which are likely to obtrude themselves on the reader of the “Jewish Peril” cannot be dismissed by a shrug of the shoulders unless one wants to strengthen the hand of the typical anti-Semite and call forth his favourite accusation of the “conspiracy of silence.” An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable. That history is by no means clear from the English translation. They would appear, from internal evidence, to have been written by Jews for Jews, or to be cast in the form of lectures, and notes for lectures, by Jews to Jews. If so, in what circumstances were they produced and to cope with what inter-Jewish emergency? Or are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?"

"Zionist Aspirations Dr. Weizmann on Future of Palestine. Dr. Weizmann; the Zionist leader, who had just returned from the Conference at San Remo, in the course of a statement yesterday on the future of Palestine expressed his appreciation, and that of his fellow Zionists for the assistance rendered to their cause by The Times. The Balfour declaration, by being incorporated in the Treat with Turkey, had received international sanction. Dealing with the mandate conferred on Great Britain, he said:- There are still important details outstanding, such as the actual terms of the mandate and the question of boundaries in Palestine. There is the delimitation of the boundary between French Syria and Palestine, which will constitute the northern frontier and the eastern line of demarcation, adjoining Arab Syria."

"Graves: Quite a lot of attention has been given to this “Protocol” matter in England! An English edition of it, “The Jewish Peril,” appeared last January…and the “Illustrated Sunday Herald” carried a big article on it February 8, 1920"

"International Jews. In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia) Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemborg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."

"Dialogue in Hell: First Dialogue"

"Dialogue in Hell: First Dialogue States, once constituted, have two kinds of enemies: the enemies within and the enemies without. What arms shall they employ in war against the foreigners? Will the two enemy generals communicate to one another their campaign plans in order that each shall be able to defend himself? Will they forbid themselves night attacks, snares, ambuscades, battles in which the number of troops are unequal? Without doubt, they will not. And such fighters would make one laugh. And these snares, these artifices, all this strategy indispensable to warfare, you don’t want them to be employed against the enemies with ink, against the disturbers of peace?... Is it possible to conduct by pure reason violent masses which are moved only by sentiment, passion, and prejudice?"

"[Describing her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania] The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn't want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos."

"Sue Coe … has done more through her paintings and prints to help animals than any other artist in history."

"I have no doubt that Sue's art … is of historic importance. A hundred years from now and more, assuming our species has managed to survive, Sue Coe's work will hang in all the great museums of the world."

"Here’s a test you can try at home: put a two-year-old in a playpen with an apple and a rabbit. If it plays with the apple and eats the rabbit, you’ve got a carnivore. According to numerous studies … vegetarians have 60% less cancer than meat-eaters, and a tiny fraction of the heart attack rate. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out we aren’t very well designed to eat meat."

"Until mid 2002, I was a meat eater. I have always instinctively been opposed to cruelty to animals, as all decent and sensible people are, but didn’t know much about how food animals were raised or processed. I assumed humans had always eaten meat because it was natural for us to, and that food animals were raised on farms where they were fairly oblivious to their surroundings and only moderately inconvenienced until their swift and humane execution. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over 95% of animals raised for food are born, live, and die in horribly painful conditions. ... Another misconception I had was about the relative intelligence and awareness of farm animals. Since becoming vegan, I’ve met rescued “food” animals now living natural lives outdoors … Cows, pigs and chickens are as smart, friendly and loving, as dogs and cats, and create friendships with other animals and people in much the same ways. Each has its own personality and its own set of likes and dislikes. If you think you’re an animal advocate because you care about saving dogs and cats in city shelters but still eat meat, think again."

"The romance genre was all around us. There was love story pulps, and there was love story sections in the newspapers. There was love stories in the movies. Wherever you went there was love stories! That’s how we got our new material, and it suddenly struck me that that’s what we haven’t done. We haven’t done any romance stories!"

":No, we didn’t do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the “Strange World of Your Dreams”. Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”."

"I was a young man. I was still growing out of the East Side. The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it."

":I knew this much — that everybody voted Democrat down my way. If you were poor, you voted Democrat and if you were rich you voted Republican."

"::Oh, communism! That was a burning issue. It was an outrageous issue. To be termed a communist would damage your whole family, damage your whole world — your friends wouldn’t talk to you. I’m talking about other people — because I wouldn’t go near the stuff. Sure, I was against the reds. I became a witch hunter. My enemies were the commies — I called them commies. In fact, Granny Goodness was a commie, Doubleheader was a commie."

":::Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn’t want to see a thing like that."

"::::I enjoyed working on any story. I’m essentially a storyteller. You name the subject, and I’ll give a good story on it."

"I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge — what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn’t draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him you wouldn’t faint dead away. There was nothing disgusting in his demeanor. There was nothing about him that repelled you. My monsters were lovable monsters."

":To make the [reader] happy was not my objective, but to make the [reader] say, “Yeah, that’s what would happen” — that was my objective. I knew the [reader] was never happy all the time. You take the Thing, he’d knock out 50 guys at a time and win — then maybe he’d sit down and kind of reflect on it: “Maybe I hurt somebody or maybe we could have done it some other way” like a human being would think, not like a monster. In other books the guy would knock out the gangs and that would be the end of it. You would see the guys in jail, and that’s it. Or it would say, “Wait until next week.”"

"The right idea to Darkseid is anything that benefits him. He isn't going to worry about you. He sees the world from where he sits, and of course what he sees is big. He's a big man. Darkseid is a tremendous, powerful, evil figure, and he's going to see everything in a cosmic view. He's not going to see a view of the candy store around the corner or what's playing at the Palladium next week. Darkseid is going to see everything in an over-powering cosmic view, and of course what else would he want but complete subjugation of everything? Earth is included in that everything, and my concept is that somewhere on Earth is someone who can solve the Anti-Life Equation, and Darkseid is after that poor soul."

":::I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school that’s what kept me in school — it wasn’t mathematics and it wasn’t geography; it was history."

"::::The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car."

"Superheroes may be superhuman in stature but inside they’re human beings and they act and react as human beings. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing legendary characters like Hercules or modern characters, you’ll find that humans are humans and they’ll react the same way in certain situations."

"I never do fairy tale people, I do people just as they are."

"If somebody wants to kill you, they make you a scout."

"Before setting off for duty, the auteur cranked out an increased flow of comics, stating that he wanted “to get enough work backlogged that I could go into the Army, kill Hitler, and get back before the readers missed us.""

"There were mostly women and some men; they looked like they hadn’t eaten for I don’t know how long. They were scrawny. Their clothes were all tattered and dirty. The Germans didn’t give a shit for anything. They just left the place; just like leaving a dog behind to starve. I was standing there for a long time just watching thinking to myself, ‘What do I do?’ Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. All I could say was, ‘Oh, God.’"

"…I don’t think there was one state that wasn’t represented there. The experience helped me appreciate the variety of the country, in the people, the language, and culture. It is incredible to think that we are as diverse as we are and how we have held together as one culture. Really, it is the one clear fact of this country that makes it unique to the world."

"Jack Kirby’s massive contributions to comics are common knowledge. His influential pulp-epic motifs. The revolutionary dynamism of his art. But here I’d like to talk about a more specific set of “King” Kirby’s innovations—his use of “minority” protagonists. Whether stressing the multi-ethnic makeup of America or revising racist preconceptions of Africa, Kirby’s work challenged comics’ unremarked upon WASPiness and white supremacy in quiet and not-so-quiet ways."

"Jack didn’t have the resources or the stomach lining to fight Marvel over copyrights, character ownership or past contractual sleights that he believed he suffered."

"Even when he was given someone else's idea, he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner but instead built it into a functioning jet pack."

"Unlike other comic book creators who were given either stateside or way-behind-lines assignments, and perhaps because Kirby understood Yiddish, the Jewish German dialect spoken by his family, he was sent as a scout behind enemy lines to draw maps. He endured and survived many harrowing violent experiences during his service, almost losing his feet to trench foot. He had no time for fascists or racists."

"His real dream was to make movies."

"My favorite thing about Kirby’s artwork was his storytelling. He was really a film director doing comics."

"I can’t get over this guy. He creates 100 villains at a sitting and then kills off half of them. Any one of these villains I can make a million off of."

"Jack Kirby—co-creator of the Marvel Universe and big chunks of DC’s—remains one of the most influential writer/artists in the history of comics. Many of Kirby’s works involve the fight against fascism, embodied in characters such as Doctor Doom and the Red Skull. This wasn’t just an imaginary battle for Kirby, who killed Nazis in World War II and was ready to throw down with any fascists he encountered stateside. Many people have fought for freedom in the military; many others have done it through art. Few have waged the war for freedom on two fronts quite like Kirby."

"…Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America’. To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived."

"I loved Jack's work and the first time I saw it I couldn't believe what I was seeing. He asked if we could do some freelance work together. I was delighted and I took him over to my little office. We worked from the second issue of Blue Bolt through ... about 25 years."

"Jack’s aliens did not look like anyone else’s aliens. They were dangerous with “alieness.” His characters in general, alien or human, posed with drama. There was something alive, almost sinister, about the locations he drew, whether it was the swamp where the alien craft first landed, or the boarding house where the chase finally ended. Even the coloring was strange, full of raw hues and knockouts where one color was washed over most of a panel, like a raw spotlight shining on the scene. Most of all, the work was vital, bursting with energy even in those panels where characters were merely standing around. And if they were in motion, they moved with authority. It was like no other comic book I had ever seen. In microcosm, that was the genius of Jack Kirby. He was like no other artist who worked in comics, a uniquely gifted individual who brought a new sensibility and a fire to the art and storytelling of American comic books, a fire that burns to this day. I’m happy to say I’m still learning from him."

"He created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of motion. Once-wooden characters cascaded from one frame to another—or even from page to page—threatening to fall right out of the book into the reader's lap. The force of punches thrown was visibly and explosively evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same characters seem static by comparison. The frenetic action and the rooftop fighting so common on the superhero set did not just materialize out of nowhere. Mr. Kirby remembered much of it from his Depression-era youth on New York’s Lower East Side, where, he once told an interviewer, the incessant fights among rival gangs were often staged up and down fire escapes and during running battles across tenement rooftops."

"There was power in the work of Jack Kirby that changed the way I looked at things. There was no one else like him and there never will be."

"Darkseid constitutes the kind of men Kirby was acquainted with in his youth. The slum lords, made famous in Will Eisner’s A Contract With God, were men (perhaps women?) with agendas. They operated on morals dictated by their business mindset. The cost of rent, the living conditions, and the quality of life they allowed for their tenants was in line with their standards. To them, that standard was appropriate. To call them “evil” or “unethical” is an inaccurate assessment. They were gods within the worlds they created."

"::The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists."

"Darkseid considers anything evil that's going to stop him. If you stop me, I consider you evil."

"I don't classify gods as far as their power goes. I classify them as far as their personality goes. Each god, if he used his power right, could defeat another god. If I used my power right I could defeat anyone on Earth if I wanted to. As a man, if I used my physical strength at its best, I could overpower anybody I wanted to. If I did it right. It's the same way with the gods. If they used their super-powers right, they could defeat any other god. Darkseid is no different except that Darkseid is an evil guy with a lot of class. He's the kind of guy that might outthink you, and with super-powers involved it could be in a very dangerous and earthshaking way."