"I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through." – Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby was an American writer, editor, and comic book artist and is considered as one of the most influential in his field. He was born as Jacob Kurtzberg on the 28th of August, 1917 and grew up in New York City. He first learned how to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons.
While working for the Nascent Comics Industry in the 1930s, he drew various comics featured under different pen names which included ‘Jack Curtiss’ before he finally settled on ‘Jack Kirby.’ In the 1940s, he regularly teamed with writer editor Joe Simon for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics, where he created the well-known and beloved superhero, Captain America.
You would think that after creating one of the greatest superheroes of all time he would have stopped there, right? But no, there’s more.
After serving in the European Theater in World War II, Kirby worked for DC, Harvey Comics, and many other publishers. At Crestwood Publications, he and Simon created the genre of romance comics and later founded their own comic company known as Mainline Publications, but unfortunately, it was short-lived.
During the 1950s, he was involved in Timely’s iteration, Atlas Comics, which would become Marvel in the next decade. Then, during the 1960s, he and writer-editor Stan Lee co-created many of the company’s major characters such as the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Hulk. The titles created by Lee and Kirby brought in high sales and critical acclaim. However, feeling as if he has been treated unfairly, mostly in the realm of authorship credit and creator’s rights, he left for the company’s rival, DC.
While working for DC, Kirby created his Fourth World Saga, which was unfortunately canceled, although the series’s New Gods have survived in the DC Universe. He had returned to Marvel the following mid-to-late 1970s before venturing into television animation and independent comics.
And finally in the later years, he had been known as "The William Black of Comics" and began receiving more recognition in the mainstream press in his well-deserved career accomplishments. In 1987, he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Following his unfortunate death due to heart failure at age 76 in 1994, he was later named a Disney Legend in 2017 with Stan Lee for their co-creations, not just in the field of publishing, but also because their creations formed the basis for Walt Disney Company’s extremely successful media franchise, which we all now know and love as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall of Fame were both named in his honor and he is now known as "The King" among comic fans for all the weight that he contributed to the medium.
So now you know where some of our beloved superheroes came from and it is by the hand of the legend we all know as, "Jack Kirby".
Signed by yours truly,
Astrid