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How did a kid from the Lower East Side of New York grew up to become the "King of Comics" and have an immeasurable impact on the world’s popular culture? That’s the story of Jacob Kurtzberg, better known as Jack Kirby,
who was born on August 28, 1917.
As a child, Kirby was likelier to get into fistfights than study art, but he
was captivated by such masters of the comic strip as Alex Raymond
(Flash Gordon), Hal Foster
(Prince Valiant), and Milton Caniff
(Terry and the Pirates). He enrolled at the Pratt Art Institute,
but soon left because they wanted him to linger over his work, and he wanted
to "get things done." His imagination was so full and his
creativity so profound that he rarely lingered over anything, turning out
dozens of pages of brilliant comic art every week.
From Pratt, he went to the Fleischer animation
studios (working on their Popeye
cartoons), but left because of the "production line" way the movies
were turned out). He then tried creating a number of comic strips (under an
equal number of pseudonyms: Curt Davis, Fred Sande, Jack Curtiss, Ted Grey,
and even just "Teddy").
While his work was good, nothing stuck until he met fellow writer and artist Joe Simon. With
Simon, he created the character Captain America for Timely Comics
(the precursor of today's Marvel Comics),
and the rest was history. Simon and Kirby became one of the top teams in comics history, but when
they suspected they were being underpaid, they moved to DC Comics,
revitalizing such characters as Manhunter
and The Sandman, and creating The Guardian
and The Boy Commandos.
After serving in World War II, the duo went back to work, creating the classic Boys’ Ranch,
the tongue-in-cheek Fighting American, any number of crime comics,
and even found time to invent the romance comic genre. But good things can last only so long, and the
partnership split up. Kirby went back to DC, where he created The Challengers of the Unknown. But after another legal battle, he returned to
Marvel, where he began an unparalleled run that saw him co-create scores of
characters, including The Fantastic Four, The Hulk,
The X-Men,
The Avengers,
Thor, The Silver Surfer, Dr. Doom, and The Black Panther, mainstream comics' first black superhero. His muscular
and dynamic style was credited by the New York Times as creating "a new grammar of storytelling and a
cinematic style of motion ... Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with
tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same characters
seem static by comparison."
But the comics business being what it is, and Kirby being Kirby, following a
dust-up over creator's rights and original art, he again went back to DC,
creating the "Fourth World,"
a series of characters (The Demon,
Mister Miracle, The New Gods, and Darkseid,
DC's ultimate supervillain) and storylines that were nothing less than cosmic
in scope. After only four years, though, he was back at Marvel yet again,
leaving only three years later to work in animation (becoming an inadvertent footnote in the Iran Hostage Crisis of the 1970s).
But ink was always in Kirby's blood, and after another brief stint at DC, he
went to smaller publishers that allowed him not only full creative freedom, but also
the ownership of his characters -- something he'd always craved.
He died in 1994, never having lost any of his talent or creativity.
It's hard today to find a comics artist -- or even a film director -- who has not been influenced in some way by Kirby's dramatic and dynamic style. He set the standard, and even 15 years after his death,
he is still "the King."
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