Jack Kirby is getting a street sign on the Lower East Side, which is another way of saying the city has finally noticed where some of its largest modern myths were manufactured. Fortune reported Tuesday that New York will name a block of Essex Street near Delancey for Kirby, the Marvel co-creator born Jacob Kurtzberg to Austrian Jewish immigrant parents in 1917. [1]

The smallness of the honor is part of its force. Kirby drew gods, mutants, soldiers, tyrants and cosmic machinery; the city gives him a sign. Yet the sign returns him to the neighborhood that mattered before the licensing empire did. The Fantastic Four and the X-Men are now corporate property, film slates, rights contracts and theme-park leverage. Kirby's origin was a tenement city where a poor boy learned that motion, anger and cramped rooms could be drawn as power. [1]

Mainstream coverage tends to place the ceremony inside Marvel nostalgia. X pushes harder on ownership: Kirby's imagination helped build a company that later turned creators into footnotes beneath trademarks. Both readings are true enough. The divergence is that the street belongs to neither Disney nor the collector market. It belongs to the city that formed him.

The Lower East Side has named streets for politicians, clergy and civic saints. Naming one for Kirby says the comic-book page was also an immigrant record: men in rooms, children in alleys, the city exploding into color because black-and-white survival was not enough.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York