The Next Wave Of Comic Book Movies: Creator Documentaries

Though comics and superheroes have been at the center of the franchise entertainment boom of the past twenty years, large chunks of the global audience remain in the dark about the artists and creators who initially brought these characters to life. That’s about to change as a wave of new documentaries are under development, often via crowdfunding campaigns, to bring their stories to a wider audience.

Following on the heels of 2022’s Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters (about the creator of Hellboy) and 2024’s Frank Miller: American Genius (about the iconoclastic auteur behind Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, The 300 and Daredevil), new projects spotlighting Jack Kirby (Captain America, The Avengers, most of the rest of the Marvel universe, and the American comic book industry as we know it), Steve Ditko (Spider-Man, Doctor Strange), painter Alex Ross (Marvels, Kingdom Come) and trailblazing publisher/activist and artist Denis Kitchen (Kitchen Sink Press, underground comix) are all in various stages of production.

You might not imagine that people who spent most of their time indoors slaving over a drawing table meeting intractable deadlines would make for very good subjects of a feature film. Indeed many of these folks were anonymous for a reason: temperamentally, they are or were artists first, preferring the company of their supplies and their muse to the spotlight enjoyed by more gregarious industry figures like the late Marvel empresario Stan Lee.

This is arguably why these figures deserve their moment in the sun, even if the glow is unlikely to be as bright as that which shines on their creations. Each creator contributed immensely to American art and culture, while laboring in an industry that, until recently, produced very little financial rewards or respect.

Kirbyvision, with Ricki Stern (“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” “UFOs: Investigating the Unknown”) in line to direct, is under development by a group led by Dan Braun and Josh Braun of Submarine Entertainment (“The Andy Warhol Diaries,” “Wild Wild Country”), with Mike Cecchini, Ron Fogelman and Christopher Longo. This film promises to be a long-overdue look at the visionary storyteller Jack Kirby, who burst on the scene as one of American comics’ first marquee-name artists in the 1940s, created the visual vocabulary of superhero comics with his dynamic work on titles like Captain America and Sandman, launched or invigorated a half-dozen new genres including romance and crime comics, and, in one of the great second acts American culture, brought the whole constellation of Marvel characters to life in the 1960s, including the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, The X-Men, the Avengers and the Black Panther.

After moving to DC in the early 1970s to do what many fans consider his greatest work, followed by a coda at Marvel and some independent comics in the 1980s, Kirby and his family spent decades fighting for the rights to his artwork, credit, and financial compensation they believed were his due. A legal case with Marvel was finally resolved in 2014, twenty years after Jack’s death.

“If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th century pop culture luminaries, Jack Kirby should be the first one to be carved into the mountain,” said Josh Braun. “Kirbyvision will let audiences experience the full scope of Jack’s limitless imagination, creativity and heart.”

The project enjoys the full support of the Kirby family and the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center. Kirby is also the subject of a huge retrospective show running at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, providing further evidence of his cultural reach.

Kirby’s compatriot in the rise of Marvel in the 1960s was Steve Ditko, whose idiosyncratic style defined the initial look of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. Ditko’s strong views about culture and philosophy kept him well out of the public spotlight at his own insistence, earning him a reputation as a recluse. But following Ditko’s death in 2018 at the age of 90, his family began sharing photos, home movies, artifacts and anecdotes that cast new light on both his personality and his career.

In conjunction with this effort, Steve Ditko: A Documentary promises to build on the scholarship of Ditko biographer Zack Kruse (Mysterious Travelers) and the wealth of new information coming from the family estate with a film that “not only honors Steve Ditko’s prolific body of work by expands on our understanding of the man himself.” Kruse set to direct and coproduce alongside Matt White, who has previously collaborated with Whoopi Goldberg and Snoop Dog.

Another artist who changed the visual iconography of American comics is Alex Ross, who came along in the 1990s using a fully-painted illustrative style that gave his books a realism unprecedented in a medium that typically relied on simplification and cartoony-ness to tell stories. The Legend of Kingdom Come, produced by Ross’s agent Sal Abbinanti and directed by Remsy Atassi, tells the inside story of one of Ross’s signature works, the Kingdom Come mini-series (later graphic novel) written by Mark Waid, which provided a chilling new context for the classic DC universe. After a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $463,000, the film screened at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre earlier this month, ahead of a major retrospective of Ross’s artwork set to open at the Dunn Museum in Libertyville, Ill.

A documentary about underground comix publisher Denis Kitchen, Oddly Compelling: The Denis Kitchen Story, is also looking to Kickstarter to get it over the finishing line. Kitchen is an artist, publisher, historian and free speech champion who got his start in the underground comix movement in the 1960s, publishing work by Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, Howard Cruse and S. Clay Wilson. He was a friend, publisher and agent for pioneering comic book creators Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman, and successfully transitioned his Kitchen Sink Press imprint into a mainstream independent comic publisher in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

One of Kitchen’s most important contributions to the medium and the industry was the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization he launched in the 1980s to combat efforts to censor comics and their creators, and which has carried on into the present day. Buried beneath Kitchen’s advocacy work and entrepreneurship is his own work as an artist and storyteller. He has recently published several collections of drawings and a career retrospective.

According to the campaign announcement, Filmmakers Soren Christiansen and Ted Intorcio have captured hours of in-depth interviews with notable friends and colleagues of Kitchen, as well as archival footage, new animations of Kitchen’s artwork, and his own reminiscences. The film hopes to be in release in Fall, 2025.