Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg on the 28th of August 1917, was an American comic book artist regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and most prolific creators. Comics fans called him "The King," and he was named "the William Blake of comics."
Jack Kirby co-created Captain America with Joe Simon in 1940, and at Marvel in the 1960s he co-created Ant-Man, the Avengers, the Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, Thor, and the X-Men. At DC he created the Fourth World saga, including the New Gods.
Jack Kirby left Marvel in 1970 after feeling treated unfairly over authorship credit and creators' rights. He was presented with a contract that barred legal retaliation, and management refused to negotiate, dismissing his contribution because they considered Stan Lee solely responsible.
Kirby Krackle, also called Kirby Dots, is Jack Kirby's artistic convention for depicting energy. It uses a field of black, pseudo-fractal shapes to represent negative space around energy, typically in explosions, ray-gun blasts, cosmic energy, and outer space phenomena.
Jack Kirby drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and a further 1,385 covers over his career, including 1,158 pages in 1962 alone. He often worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, producing four to five finished pages daily.
Jack Kirby died of heart failure at his Thousand Oaks, California home on the 6th of February 1994, aged 76. He was an inaugural inductee of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1987 and was posthumously named a Disney Legend on the 14th of July 2017.