Poor Mojo's Newswire

Jack Kirby didn’t get to be an intellectual. That’s a label others stick on you. When Jack told Will Eisner, as recorded in Eisner’s book SHOP TALK, of the time in his career when he “began to intellectualise,” you can almost literally hear Eisner’s condescension come off the page. Art Spiegelman, struggling to say anything of import about Kirby in a conversation with Gary Groth, calls his work “dimwitted.” ... Somewhere in the back of Jack Kirby’s severed robotic head, the old Philip K Dick subroutines assert themselves for a moment, and the thing’s misty eyes project a Phildickian alternate world where Jack Kirby became the progenitor of a two-fisted Jewish intellectual line. This altered timewave surfs me to late 2008, where Douglas Rushkoff, having now taken boxing lessons and been blooded in streetfights, beats the shit out of two muggers on a Brooklyn street corner and writes about the experience in his next book LIFE INC., a long and involved consideration of the social contract and the pleasing efficacy of stamping on someone’s balls. On his wall is a picture of Jack Kirby in a fine suit with an expensive and most importantly elegant cigar in his hand, a cigar like a Fifties rocketship.... Can you imagine a Jack Kirby-designed Skylab? Even a Jack Kirby-designed car? Would he see that stories can be told through the design of things? That there is fiction in architecture, and narrative in design? Mark Evanier, assistant, longtime friend and biographer to Jack Kirby: “…(it was) hard to realize that he was a brilliant man and a much deeper thinker than you had to be to draw super-heroes and super-villains punching each other across the page… I increasingly find myself wishing Jack had been granted a venue where he could have done more than Marvel Comics, regardless of what company published him.”

The leader of the Church of Scientology strode into the room with a boom box and an announcement: Time for a game of musical chairs. David Miscavige had kept more than 30 members of his church's executive staff cooped up for weeks in a small office building outside Los Angeles, not letting them leave except to grab a shower. They slept on the floor, their food carted in. Their assignment was to develop strategic plans for the church. But the leader trashed their every idea and berated them as incompetents and enemies, of him and the church. Prove your devotion, Miscavige told them, by winning at musical chairs. Everyone else — losers, all of you — will be banished to Scientology outposts around the world. If families are split up, too bad.

But could it be that the Ensign imbroglio poses a particularly thorny problem for some Republicans because, aside from the sex and jobs angle, the story threatens to shine an unflattering light on the role of the shadowy religious group to which the Nevada senator belongs? . . . In The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, published last year, the journalist Jeff Sharlet reported that both Ensign and Coburn -- as well as several other members of Congress of both parties, but predominantly Republicans -- are members of a secretive and publicity-shy religious organization founded in 1935 that aims, broadly speaking, to forge ties with decision-makers around the world in order to put Christian teachings at the center of public policy. Elsewhere in the book, Sharlet added that Ensign and Coburn each at times lived at the Family's group home for members of Congress, described as a "four-story red-brick Washington townhouse, a former convent at 133 C St SE, run by a Family affiliate called the C Street Foundation." (The Atlantic's Josh Green wrote about Hillary Clinton's ties to the group, in the context of a larger profile of the then-senator, in 2006.) To be clear, the senators may have moved since then. The "Christian-oriented group house" that Ensign and Coburn currently call home -- and which the confrontation over the affair appears to have taken place at -- may not be the same as the 133 C Street house. . . .