Wealth & Money Quote by Jack Kirby

Kirby’s line lands like a backhanded love letter to an industry he helped invent and that routinely failed to love him back. “In the old days” isn’t nostalgia so much as a pressure test: if the work couldn’t pay, what kept you drawing? The answer, “because you loved it,” reads tender on the surface and quietly accusatory underneath. It frames passion as both genuine fuel and the convenient alibi employers use when they don’t intend to share the profits.

The context matters: American comics matured in a system built on work-for-hire contracts, thin margins, and disposable labor. Kirby co-created characters that became cultural infrastructure, then watched corporate owners reap the long tail. So when he says there was “no money,” it’s not a quaint memory of starving-artist purity; it’s a reminder that the medium’s “golden age” was also an age of creative extraction. The bluntness is the point. No metaphors, no romance. Just the economics.

The intent feels two-pronged. He’s honoring a generation of artists who made comics under conditions that demanded obsession, not strategy. At the same time, he’s warning newer creators about the trap of that very mythology. “Love” is real, but it’s also weaponized: if you can be persuaded you’re lucky to be here, you can be underpaid and still told you’re living the dream.

Kirby’s subtext is modern creator discourse before it had hashtags: passion doesn’t cancel exploitation; it’s often the reason exploitation works.