It was a Wednesday in September. The sixth judging from a quick look at the calendar app. I sat in the retirement home day room with my grandfather, as I had almost every Wednesday for almost two years now. It was a standing family engagement: the weekly card game at the old folks’ home. But while Mom was shuffling the deck, I had my iPhone open, showing him the nominations for The Pitch’s Best of Kansas City. Open on the screen were the “Arts & Entertainment” listings, specifically the Best Play category. There, sandwiched between local productions of The Tempest and A Raisin in the Sun, were two words: King Kirby. “Look, grandpa!” I said to him, “Our play got nominated for an award.” It was hard for me to know how much he understood. He had turned 96 that last May and had begun sinking into dementia. But he still knew who I was. He certainly still knew how to play blackjack. And whether or not he would retain it for more than a few minutes, he knew I was showing him something I was excited about. It still made him smile.
The winners were to be announced on November 3. I didn’t realize that five days after then, Grandpa would be gone.
Gilbert Suppes was born in Liebenthal, Kansas in 1927. He served in both the Merchant Marines and Army during World War II, going career Air Force after the war. He eventually retired to Leavenworth, Kansas, close to his two daughters and two grandsons. One of them grew up to be a giant comic and theater nerd. In 2019, Gilbert suffered a seizure that turned into a stroke. Another massive seizure put him in the hospital on New Years Eve 2021, leading us to look into assisted living options. This was just days after I applied to our local Fringe Fest, and finally got the nerve to reach out to Crystal Skillman about directing/producing her and her husband’s (Fred Van Lente) stage play. After surviving my first directing gig at The Barn Players’ 6×10 Festival, I had gotten brave enough to try my hand at KC Fringe. And telling the story of legendary comic artist Jack Kirby has been a dream of mine from my earliest high school drama club days. Now that I knew such a script already existed, and it was a damn good one, I couldn’t not try.
My first exposure to the show when it was released as an audio drama on the Broadway Podcast Network. Listening to it while I ran errands, I often found myself either choking back tears or fist pumping in joy, when I wasn’t repeating the Stan Lee dialog out loud at least. Because let’s be honest, we all have a Stan Lee impression. The script takes Jack’s story, with all of its triumphs and tragedies, and presents it with razor sharp dialog and careful plotting. When I initially reached out, I wasn’t sure I’d hear anything back. I didn’t expect Skillman and Van Lente to both be the show’s biggest cheerleaders, even offering to edit their own script to fit the Fringe time constraints. But that was the first of many very welcome pleasant surprises.
But while Kirby’s origin story is the stuff of comic fandom legend, parts of it seemed familiar. In the broad strokes, Gilbert and Jack couldn’t be any more different. Jack was a Manhattan born artist. Gilbert was a Kansas farm kid who worked on early electronics. But both were men of the depression, raised by families living from hand to mouth, be it in a Lower East Side tenement or a ramshackle down from the only gas station in the county. Both men served in the war. And while stories of Jack’s downtown block fights were the stuff of legends, the Western Kansas kids could be just as vicious. Both stories are of men who were born into the most dire of circumstances and transcending them, even when it seemed like the world was working against them.
Like young Jacob Kurtzberg (Kirby’s birth name), Gilbert used to draw on whatever he had available, much to the chagrin of his parents, and the nuns who taught his grade school classes. Mostly cowboys or whatever he read in the pulps. He kept doing this well into his old age. When I was six years old, I’d find his sketches scattered around the house, usually on the blank sides of leftover punch cards from his computing days. We used to wonder what he could have done had he been in an environment that encouraged him. But to quote an oft repeated line in our family, “Men in the depression didn’t go to art school.” Granted Jack did. But he also only lasted a week. Tom Scioli’s “Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics” may say it was because his parents couldn’t afford the tuition. Though Jack himself would just say the school moved too slow.
Continued belowWhen rehearsals were underway, we rehearsed wherever we could: In apartment living rooms, in library meeting rooms, a fair chunk of the show was blocked in the back of a Perkins. I was pleased because my usual infodumping about the New Gods was officially “Dramaturgy” now. Props were mostly acquired from thrift stores. And a fair portion of the costuming came from Grandpa’s closet. We didn’t rehearse on Wednesday. On those days, during our card game, I would show grandpa photos I took of the show coming together, much like I did in my high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. He loved seeing his old hats and coats on stage as much in 2022 as he did in 2002.
King Kirby made its KC debut on July 22, 2022 at Upside Bungee, an aerial gym and dance studio in the West Bottoms. More appropriately, it also hosted the local branch of Sketchy’s Anti-Art School for a while too. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this guy” was the most prevalent comment we got after the show. Audiences moved by Jack’s story expressed how strange it was to live in a pop culture landscape dominated by Marvel, yet never hearing the name “Kirby.” Even our stage manager gushed at how amazing the script was, stating that it was important to get the cues right because “the script deserves it.”
I did take the liberty of casting myself as Stan Lee. After the show, when people would ask who wrote the script, I generally tended to wheeze something like “Krshull Skilm” and “Fruh VinLinth.” But we also made fliers for the show, so it was often easier to hand them one of those.
The following year, this year, we were invited to perform the show at Planet Comicon, mostly thanks to a good word from Fringe director Audrey Crabtree. And maybe some gentle nudging from our stage manager Jen Raines. Due to a scheduling conflict, Glenn Craig (Jack Kirby) and Alex Sexton (“The Bosses”) couldn’t reprise their roles. That led us to discovering Dionna Patrick, who KC audiences recently had the pleasure of seeing in James Baldwin’s Amen Corner at the KC Melting Pot Theater, and Caylee Smith, who even before we walked on stage was writing our Fringe 2023 show. That would become Of Monsters and Men (and Murder). Violett Springate, whom I knew from my KC RenFest days, would return as Joe Simon. Stage Manager Jen Raines once again stepped into the role of Roz, bringing the same chemistry she had with Glenn to her pairing with Dionna. And I once again brushed off that same impression I had been working on since grade school. We also had the honor of having Fred Van Lente in the audience, as he was tabling at PCKC, his first time in KC. Granted now that one of the writers was there, we had some of the weirder tech issues of the entire run. The lights went off too early. The sound got disconnected. I had a contact pop out backstage. But it didn’t matter. I was there, with my friends, performing a story that meant so much to me, for one of the storytellers, at my hometown comicon. I couldn’t be more proud.
When Pitch Best of KC voting opened and I started campaigning, both Skillman and Van Lente were there, drumming up support. While we didn’t win, it was an absolute honor to work alongside them, and I will be forever grateful for everything they’ve done. And besides, we lost to The Tempest. You can’t be too mad about losing to actual Shakespeare.
Grandpa never saw either show. Even before the stroke, long car rides were difficult on him. And Leavenworth is about 45 minutes away from literally everything in the area. But he showed his support the best he couldn’t. A smile and a kind word were about all he could manage towards the end. But that was enough. Even if he couldn’t see my portrayal of Stan Lee, I still have the A&E Biography VHS he recorded for me when I was ten. I still have the comics he and Grandma bought for me from Ken’s downtown. And we still tell the story of how hard we laughed when I had to kiss Terrance Mulcare (father of Gotham and Jessica Jones actor Kieran Mulcare) on stage during a production of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. While Gilbert may not have gotten the encouragement he needed to pursue art, he gave it to his grandson in ways he didn’t even realize. And over a month after he left us, that’s something I’ll carry with me. Even if it’s just an excuse to show off my Stan Lee impression.
