ConnexionThe Thing’s Real Secret Identity? Marvel Legend Jack Kirby
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is Marvel Studios’ 37th movie, but it’s based on Marvel’s first modern comic. It’s an eagerly awaited homecoming after three misfires by 20th Century Fox and amidst a continuous post-Infinity Saga MCU slump.
It’s also the movie many Jack Kirby fans and Jewish comic book fans have been looking forward to, and for the same reason—Ben Grimm, AKA the Thing.
One Small Step
Fantastic Four #1, cover-dated November 1961 and published August 8, is arguably the most important comic book published since 1938’s Action Comics #1.
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the first issue was somewhat crude and incoherent, especially for two industry veterans, but it more than made up for it with its startling originality and tangible exuberance. Readers took notice.
The Fantastic Four were like no superhero team before. For one, they weren’t a team, they were a family—a constantly squabbling, borderline dysfunctional, but loving family. They were round characters (for the time), with real personalities, emotional depth and relatable faults. And they didn’t have secret identities; everyone knew who they were. They had superhero codenames—Mister Fantastic, Invisible Girl (later Woman), Human Torch, and Thing—but they barely used them. They were Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben.
The comic was an innovative, genius blend of popular genres of the era: space adventure (which was more DC’s domain, with Adam Strange, Green Lantern, and a revitalized Superman), rampaging monsters (a genre Kirby and Lee mastered and became associated with more than any other creators) and romantic melodrama (which Kirby also pioneered in comics together with Joe Simon in 1947’s Young Romance).
It was a revolutionary approach and it sparked the Marvel Revolution. In a five-year explosion of inspiration, they followed with the Hulk, Thor and Ant-Man in 1962; Iron Man, Avengers and X-Men in 1963; Silver Surfer and Black Panther in 1966; and dozens of other characters. (Lee also created Spider-Man in 1962 and Doctor Strange in 1963 with Steve Ditko and Daredevil in 1964 with Bill Everett. Kirby would go on to create Darkseid and the New Gods for DC in 1970.)
Professionals and fans today debate fervently what and how much Lee and Kirby each created of that first FF issue, but as Kirby’s biographer and former assistant Mark Evanier writes in his definitive Kirby: King of Comics:
“There would later be disagreement over the sequence of events that brought forth the new heroes. Lee would say he figured out the story and characters, typed up a plot outline (which still exists), selected Jack to draw it, and handed him the basics of the first issue. Kirby would say that… he came up with the characters and even point to how similar the origin was to Challengers of the Unknown. Among those who worked around them at the time, there was a unanimous view: that Fantastic Four was created by Stan and Jack. No further division of credit seemed appropriate.”
Still, when it came to Marvel’s first family, as time went on it was clear that Kirby was the main creative engine—and that he was putting a lot of himself in the comic.
Kirby Kreations
A surprising amount of Kirby’s work is autobiographical. He regularly borrowed from his life experiences, from his cultural background and from his friends and family. Even the action sequences he became famous for were informed by his childhood rooftop gang fights and his combat experience in WWII, which earned him the Bronze Star.
He based many characters on himself, in different ways, including Captain America, Orion, Dan Turpin and Oberon, though more than any other, Ben Grimm was his personal avatar.
The breakout star of the FF cast, the Thing was a working-class, gruff but kindhearted, stubborn, emotional, intelligent, self-deprecating, cigar-chomping, thick-browed, street tough—everything Kirby was. He was even named Benjamin Jacob Grimm, Jacob being Jack’s birthname and Ben his father’s name.
Neal Kirby, Jack’s son, agrees. He told me the following: “It is generally recognized… that he based The Thing from Fantastic Four on himself, however, more based on his personality. I often describe my father as having the scrappiness of Leo Gorcey in the Dead End Kids, the language of Damon Runyon, and the attitude of Jimmy Cagney. Stick a cigar in The Thing's mouth and you have my father.”
“Nick Fury is how I wish others saw me. Ben Grimm is probably closer to the way they do see me,” Kirby once said.
“Everybody I’ve talked to has compared me to Ben Grimm,” he said in another interview. “Perhaps I’ve got his temperament, I’ve got his stubbornness.”
But later on he became less coy about it. “If you'll notice the way the Thing talks and acts, you'll find that the Thing is really Jack Kirby,” Evanier quotes Kirby in his book. “He has my manners, he has my manner of speech, and he thinks the way I do. He's excitable, and you'll find that he's very, very active among people, and he can muscle his way through a crowd. I find I'm that sort of person.”
“In fact,” Evanier told IGN, “often when I re-read an old Kirby comic for the umpteenth time, I somehow notice aspects of Jack I never noticed there before.”
Kirby also incorporated elements from his life into Grimm’s backstory. They both came from the Lower East Side of New York City and grew up poor, Kirby on Delancey Street and Grimm on the fictional Yancy Street. Both were in a youth gang, Kirby in the Suffolk Street Gang and Grimm in the Yancy Street Gang.
“The references to Jack's childhood,” Evanier said, “would be unmistakable.”
On July 9, 2025, the real Delancey Street was renamed Yancy Street for the day, and the corner of Essex Street, where Kirby was born and lived (at 147 Essex), was renamed Jack Kirby Way. (Unfortunately it wasn’t permanent, like Bill Finger Way uptown in the Bronx, after the cocreator of Batman and Green Lantern.)
When the US joined WWII and Kirby was drafted, he became an army infantryman and a war hero. Same with Grimm, though he got to be a more glamorous pilot.
Kirby worked out other issues through the Thing, like his class insecurity. Grimm, a kid from the ghetto, constantly felt out of place among the cultured Sue and Johnny and the genteel, highly educated Reed.
Comics legend Gil Kane called Kirby “the supreme comic artist,” also noting that “the one thing you can see in Jack’s work is an angry, repressed personality.”
Other members of the Fantastic Four, meanwhile, were based on people in Kirby’s life. Sue Storm was named after his daughter, Susan. Reed Richards, the intellectual genius but emotionally aloof leader of the quartet, who’s Grimm’s longtime friend but often fails to appreciate him or treat him fairly, and who’s mainly responsible for his predicament as the Thing, has analogues to Stan Lee. There was even a 1978 issue of What If…?, “What If the Fantastic Four Were the Original Marvel Bullpen?”, in which Lee was cast as Mister Fantastic and Kirby as the Thing, with remarkably little change.
It’s a Jewish Thing
Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, to Jewish immigrants from Austria. He was raised Conservative and went to Hebrew school, and by all accounts was fiercely proud of his Jewishness. But when he was breaking in as an illustrator, he legally changed his name to Kirby.
“I wanted to be an all-around American,” he said in a 1990 interview. “My mother gave me hell. My father gave me hell.” When asked if it was because antisemitism was rife then, he said “Yes. A lot of it… And it hasn’t changed. There’s anti-Semitism today.”
Still, Kirby regularly included Jewish themes and motifs in his work, especially his 1970s magnum opus, The New Gods (aka The Fourth World). “Jack talked often about his Jewish culture,” Evanier told IGN. “He thought it was obvious.”
Much of that can be found in the Fantastic Four comics. In the 1987 documentary Masters of Comic Book Art, Kirby explained, “I went to the Bible. I came up with Galactus. And there I was, in front of this tremendous figure, who I knew very well because I’ve always felt him… And of course, the Silver Surfer is the fallen angel.”
Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds, is a sci-fi take on the wrathful, early-Old-Testament God. The Silver Surfer is his herald, or messenger, being the original Hebrew meaning of the word “angel.” Kirby also told the Galactus Trilogy with appropriate biblical bombast.
But the thing that remains the most Jewish about Kirby’s work is the Thing.
Grimm had been understood by many fans and professionals to be Jewish for decades, his biographical parallels to Kirby being the key, but not sole, element. He was a type of golem, for one—a creature of Jewish folklore formed from clay and animated to be a super-strong protector. Especially in his early appearances, before he looked like rock, the Thing looked like mud or clay, lumpy and granular. (Marvel does have a Golem character, and he does look like the early Thing.)
That his love interest and eventual wife, Alicia Masters, is a sculptor in the medium of clay, and that her supervillain father, Puppet Master, uses radioactive clay to make figures of people that he can then control, makes for a thematic symmetry that’s hard to ignore.
There was also a famous (among Kirby fans, at least) 1976 Hannukah greeting card Kirby sent, featuring the Thing in a yarmulke and tallit (prayer shawl), holding a Hebrew prayer book and standing next to a menorah. He hung a copy on the wall of his studio, and when visitors asked, he’d quip, “It's a Jewish Thing.”
After 41 years of hinting, metatext finally became text in Fantastic Four V. 3 #56 (August 2002), by Karl Kesel and Stuart Immonen. Evocatively titled “Remembrance of Things Past,” it features Grimm revisiting the Lower East Side—in Kirby’s day known as an immigrant, and especially Jewish, ghetto—and the memories of his childhood.
As a member of the Yancy Street Gang, he’d stolen a golden Star of David necklace from local pawnbroker Hiram Sheckerberg, and he comes to return it. When the villain Powderkeg attacks and Sheckerberg appears to die, Grimm recites, from memory, the Shema, a Hebrew prayer said before death (among other times).
But Sheckerberg comes to, and he confronts Grimm about hiding his Jewish identity. Grimm explains that, being perceived as a hideous monster (a concept in the comic that was never really justified visually), he didn’t want that associated with Jews.
It gave much of the Thing’s history a new context. Often feared, hated, or ridiculed on sight, a perpetual outsider alienated from society, it became a metaphor for the Jewish historical experience.
The story ends with Sheckerberg comparing the Thing to the golem and reminding him that the golem isn’t a monster but a protector. Grimm then keeps the Star of David in his hollow “4” belt buckle—his Jewish symbol behind his superhero symbol.
Dan Slott, who wrote the Thing Vol. 2 ministries (2006) and Fantastic Four Vol. 6 #1–46 (2018–2022), said in an interview, “As someone who started reading [FF] as an eight year old Jewish kid, I know it means the world to me... We all knew Ben was Jewish.”
In Thing Vol. 2 #8 (August 2006), Slott and artist Kieron Dwyer gave Grimm a bar mitzvah, celebrating his in-continuity thirteenth year as the Thing. Then in Fantastic Four Vol. 6 #5/Vol. 1 #650 (February 2019), Slott and artist Aaron Kuder married Grimm and Alicia Masters in a Jewish ceremony. Both were groundbreaking depictions of Jewish faith, tradition and joy in comics.
The Thing has since embraced his Jewishness, like in 2009’s Marvel Digital Holiday Special #2, in which his co-creator Stan Lee and artist Nick Dragotta jokingly show that none of the Fantastic Four, even Reed, are sure how to properly spell “Hanukkah” in their holiday card to Ben (the word being in Hebrew, it has several accepted spellings in English).
In Marvel Strange Tales II #3 (December 2010), Harvey Pekar and Ty Templeton tell another humorous story, revealing that Pekar and Grimm attended Hebrew school together. And in Marvel Holiday Special 2011, by Jamie S. Rich and Paco Diaz, Grimm attends a Hanukkah party thrown by Kitty Pryde with fellow Jewish superheroes Moon Knight, Wiccan, Sasquatch and Songbird.
The Thing’s Jewishness has also been highlighted in other media, notably the Disney+ animated series Spidey and His Amazing Friends, which showed him celebrating Hanukkah and Rosh Hashanah.
Today the Thing is the most famous explicitly Jewish superhero (excluding Magneto, who’s technically a supervillain, or Superman, whose Jewishness is allegorical).
It’s something Brian Michael Bendis, who co-wrote Ultimate Fantastic Four #1–6 (2004) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 #1–27 (2013–2015), where he added the Thing to the team, sees as important. “As a little Jewish boy going to Hebrew school, when I found out Ben Grimm was Jewish, it blew my mind,” he said in an interview. “People don’t talk about representation in regards to Judaism as much as I would like or hope… More Jewish representation would help with ignorance that surrounds us constantly.”
That representation, unfortunately, was nowhere to be found in the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films. The 2015 film showed a menorah on Grimm’s shelf for a split-second.
Jewish representation in popular media as a whole is still very retrograde, dabbling in stereotypes and tokenism that usually aren’t tolerated today for other minorities. Marvel Studios in particular have come under fire for their mishandling of Jewish representation and repeated whitewashing of Jewish characters. But they’ve been correcting course with things like Wiccan’s bar mitzvah in Agatha All Along.
Casting Jewish actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps generated positive attention from fans and the press, and hints of a Jewish portrayal were dropped as far back as last year’s San Diego Comic Con (though not many seemed to notice).
The film—minor spoilers ahead—does make an attempt, though ultimately a disappointing one. Grimm enjoys black and white cookies, a New York Jewish staple, and makes visits to a 1960s Lower East Side that’s unmistakably a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. There he flirts with a schoolteacher, a large Star of David visible above the school gate. In a nice touch, this love interest is an original character named Rachel Rozman (Natasha Lyonne), very likely named after Roz, Jack Kirby’s wife.
Where the move drops the ball is when, as the world appears to be ending, Grimm visits the synagogue next door to the school. When Rachel asks if he’s come to see the rabbi, he answers dismissingly, “No, I came to see you.” Grimm was never the Jewish parallel to Matt Murdock, constantly wrestling with his faith, but just little bit more would have gone a long way.
Maximum Kirby
The Thing’s “Kirbyness” is equally a miss. He’s too even-tempered, too at ease, too comfortable in his own skin. Michael Chiklis played him more cartoonishly in the Fox films, but also truer to the comic, and to Kirby.
The Thing, and the film in general, are also missing that frenetic, neurotic energy that Lee and Kirby so masterfully imbued their FF comics with. That said, the movie does do Kirby justice.
The film takes place in an alternate universe named Earth-828, a nod to Kirby’s birthday, August 28. Early on, a brief scene shows the team fighting Giganto, recreating the cover of Fantastic Four #1. Throughout the movie, Kirby’s distinctive style and flare are on full display. “He’s a visionary,” director Matt Shakman said in a recent Marvel.com article. “We wanted to honor that.”
“We wanted it to be more than just a passing tip of the hat,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige added. “There are direct lines from his pencil… into this film.”
Especially when Galactus shows up, the film takes on the grandeur of Kirby’s work, becoming an awe-inspiring sci-fi epic of biblical scale.
Aesthetically, it’s the most Kirby Marvel movie or show yet (aside from the What If...? series finale, perhaps). 2021’s Eternals, which was based on a comic he both wrote and drew, failed miserably to capture his genius, changing impressionistic wonders like the Celestial starship into a triangular gray slab.
Kirby even makes his first MCU cameo, of sorts, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment: When the Silver Surfer appears above Times Square, two comic book creators resembling Kirby and Lee are startled from their work on giant monster comics (showing art from actual comics the pair worked on in real life).
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the movie Kirby fans have been waiting for. It even ends with a title card quoting Kirby (from a 1982 interview); “If you look at my characters, you’ll find me. No matter what kind of character you create or assume, a little of yourself must remain there.”
It’s a tribute befitting a King.
Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. His work has appeared in CNN, New York Daily News, The Forward, Literary Hub and Philosophy Now, among others. He is the author of the bestseller Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero and co-producer of the award-winning documentary JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience. Follow him at royschwartz.com and on Instagram, X and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz.
