Jack Kirby

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Kirby drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and another 1,385 covers across his career. In 1962 alone he published 1,158 pages. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at a drawing table in his home, turning out four to five finished pages every day. Comics fans called him "The King." The New York Times once labeled him "the William Blake of comics." Yet for much of his life he fought the companies that profited from his imagination over credit, royalties, and the original art boards he had filled by hand. He was born Jacob Kurtzberg at 147 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He helped invent the superhero, then the romance comic, then a private mythology of gods and machines. How does one self-taught artist from a garment worker's family come to be called one of the chief architects of the American imagination? And why did the man who co-created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and the Black Panther spend his final years calling those companies thugs?

• 2. Lower East Side Roots

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  Rose Bernstein and Benjamin Kurtzberg were Austrian-Jewish immigrants, and Benjamin earned his living as a garment factory worker. Their son, born on the 28th of August 1917, wanted out of the neighborhood. He liked to draw and went searching for places to learn more about art. Essentially self-taught, the young artist traced cartoon figures from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He named the comic strip artists Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and Alex Raymond among his influences, alongside editorial cartoonists C. H. Sykes, "Ding" Darling, and Rollin Kirby. The Educational Alliance turned him away because, he said, he drew "too fast with charcoal." He found an outlet instead at the newspaper of the Boys Brotherhood Republic, a "miniature city" on East 3rd Street where street kids ran their own government. At age 14 he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and left after a week. "I wasn't the kind of student that Pratt was looking for," he recalled. "They wanted people who would work on something forever. I didn't want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done." That impatience would carry him through a string of pen names before he settled on the one that stuck.

• 3. Finding A Name

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  Jack Curtiss was one of the first masks. Under that pseudonym he drew single-panel advice cartoons such as Your Health Comes First!!! after joining the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate in 1936. He moved to the animation company Fleischer Studios as an inbetweener on Popeye cartoons, then left in a hurry. "From Fleischer I had to get out," he said, describing the studio as "a factory in a sense, like my father's factory. They were manufacturing pictures." At the packager Eisner & Iger he turned out work under a rotating cast of names. He was Curt Davis on the science fiction strip "The Diary of Dr. Hayward," Fred Sande on the Western "Wilton of the West," Ted Grey on the humor feature "Abdul Jones," and Teddy on "Socko the Seadog." For Robert W. Farrell's Associated Features Syndicate he first used the surname as Lance Kirby on the strip Lightnin' and the Lone Rider. He chose Jack Kirby because it reminded him of the actor James Cagney. He took offense at anyone who suggested he had changed his name to hide his Jewish heritage. At Fox Feature Syndicate, earning fifteen dollars a week, he met a Fox editor who would become his partner for the next quarter century.

• 4. The Simon Partnership

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  "I loved Jack's work and the first time I saw it I couldn't believe what I was seeing," Joe Simon recalled in 1988. The two began with the second issue of Blue Bolt and kept collaborating for roughly 25 years. They were hired onto the staff of Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, the company that would become Marvel. There, in late 1940, they created the patriotic superhero Captain America. Simon became editor with Kirby as art director, and he said he negotiated 25 percent of the feature's profits from Goodman. The first issue of Captain America Comics sold out in days, and the second issue's print run was set at over a million copies. Simon felt Goodman was not paying the promised percentage, so he sought work for both men at National Comics Publications, later DC. The pair negotiated a combined five hundred dollars a week, against the seventy-five and eighty-five they earned at Timely. Many people knew of the plan, including Timely editorial assistant Stan Lee. When Goodman found out, he ordered them off after Captain America Comics #10. Kirby remained bitterly convinced that Lee had betrayed them, even as Simon was willing to give Lee the benefit of the doubt. At National, told to "just do what you want," the team launched the Boy Commandos, which sold over a million copies a month and became the company's third best-selling title. That suspicion of Lee would outlast the war that interrupted everything.

• 5. Soldier And Scout

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  Kirby was drafted into the U.S. Army on the 7th of June 1943. After basic training at Camp Stewart near Savannah, Georgia, he was assigned to Company F of the 11th Infantry Regiment. He landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on the 23rd of August 1944, months after D-Day. A lieutenant, learning that a comics artist was in his command, made him a scout who advanced into towns to draw reconnaissance maps and pictures. It was extremely dangerous duty. During the winter of 1944 he suffered severe frostbite and was taken to a hospital in London. Doctors considered amputating his legs, which had turned black, but he recovered and walked again. He had married Rosalind "Roz" Goldstein on the 23rd of May 1942, and through the war she sent daily letters by v-mail while she worked in a lingerie shop. He returned to the United States in January 1945, spent his last six months in the motor pool at Camp Butner in North Carolina, and was honorably discharged as a private first class on the 20th of July 1945. He carried home a Combat Infantryman Badge and a European/African/Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with a bronze Battle Star, then went back to inventing for a peacetime market.

• 6. Inventing Romance

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  Young Romance #1 carried a cover date of October 1947 and sold a staggering 92 percent of its print run. Simon had been inspired by the romantic-confession magazine True Story and transplanted the idea to comic books, building a first-issue mock-up with Kirby. He asked Crestwood for half the profits, and publishers Teddy Epstein and Mike Bleier agreed, on the condition that the creators took no money up front. The title became, in one account, "Jack and Joe's biggest hit in years." It went monthly and spawned Young Love, and together the two sold two million copies a month, by Simon's count, later joined by Young Brides. Dozens of imitators followed from Timely, Fawcett, Quality, and Fox Feature Syndicate, yet the Simon and Kirby romance titles kept selling millions. In late 1953 or early 1954 the partners launched their own company, Mainline Publications, subletting space from Al Harvey's Harvey Publications at 1860 Broadway. Mainline published four titles, including the war comic Foxhole and the crime comic Police Trap, before folding in 1955. After the pair reused old Crestwood artwork in the title In Love, Crestwood refused to pay. An audit put the company's debt to them at 130,000 dollars over seven years; Crestwood paid 10,000 dollars plus delayed payments. The partnership had become strained. "He wanted to do other things and I stuck with comics," Kirby said in 1971. "We parted friends."

• 7. The Marvel Explosion

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  The Fantastic Four #1 arrived in November 1961, and some have noted how much it shares with Kirby's earlier Challengers of the Unknown. For almost a decade afterward Kirby supplied Marvel's house style. He created or co-created the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and Magneto, Doctor Doom, the Inhumans and their hidden city of Attilan, and the Black Panther, comics' first black superhero, with his nation of Wakanda. Artist Gil Kane called him "the single most influential figure in the turnaround in Marvel's fortunes," saying editors taught new artists "the ABCs, which amounted to learning Jack Kirby." Not every assignment fit. Kirby penciled the first six pages of a Spider-Man story, but Lee said, "I hated the way he was doing it... it was too heroic," and handed the work to Steve Ditko, though Kirby still drew the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15. The collaboration's high point is widely held to be "The Galactus Trilogy" in Fantastic Four #48-50, from March to May 1966, introducing the planet-devouring giant Galactus and his herald, the Silver Surfer. Fantastic Four #48 placed #24 in a 2001 reader poll of the 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time. Lee found the story was a favorite on college campuses. Kirby pushed the form itself, building photo-collage covers and developing the energy-field technique now called "Kirby Krackle." Resentment was building underneath the success, over Lee's media prominence, lost creative control, and Marvel's failure to credit him for plotting and creation.

• 8. Breaking Away

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  In 1970 Kirby was earning 35,000 dollars a year freelancing for Marvel, the equivalent of over 271,000 dollars in 2024. That year management handed him a contract barring legal retaliation and refused to negotiate, dismissing his contribution because they considered Lee solely responsible. He left for DC under editorial director Carmine Infantino. There he built "The Fourth World," a set of interlinked titles he edited, wrote, and drew: New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People, plus the existing Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, a book he chose so he would not cost anyone a job. Mister Miracle was an escape artist, a vessel his assistant Mark Evanier suggests held Kirby's feelings of constraint. The hero's wife was based on Roz, and Kirby caricatured Stan Lee in the book as Funky Flashman, a portrait Lee found hurtful. The Fourth World titles were commercially unsuccessful and canceled, but the New Gods endured in the DC Universe. He returned to Marvel in 1975, announced by Lee at Marvelcon as Kirby "came waltzin' down the aisle," and there created The Eternals and their alien giants the Celestials. Later still he made one of the industry's earliest creator-owned deals with Pacific Comics. His art has hung in the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and a single cover he drew, for Tales of Suspense #84, sold for 167,300 dollars at auction in February 2014. He died of heart failure at his Thousand Oaks, California home on the 6th of February 1994, aged 76. On the 14th of July 2017 he was named a Disney Legend, his creations now the foundation of a film franchise that by June 2018 had earned nearly 7.4 billion dollars.