How a Lower East Side Jew conquered the multiverse

Disney bought Marvel and passed its colorful, infantilizing rag on everything with fast food smiles and franchise rules

How a Lower East Side Jew conquered the multiverse

All this time, comic book artist Jack Kirby was drawing himself. In a street scene memory from the 1980s, we see the clothesline eruv of the old Lower East Side where he was born and raised: street toughs, peddlers, a cascade of garbage whooshing through a tenement window and an iceman in a horse cart. It could well be Yancy Street, where Ben Grimm, aka Thing, was initiated into a gang, before he took his fateful space flight and was reconstitut…