Jack Kirby

• Born: August 28, 1917
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 6, 1994
• Place of death: Thousand Oaks, California

Comic-book artist and writer

Kirby’s style focused on an explosive sense of action, and he rewrote the rules for the comic-book narrative. He cocreated such iconic superhero characters as Captain America and Thor.

Areas of achievement: Art; entertainment

Early Life

Jack Kirby (KUR-bee) was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, in the Bowery neighborhood of New York known as Skid Row, in which he would grow up. The son of an immigrant Austrian garment worker, Kirby attended Jewish school until the age of fourteen, when his artistic ability enabled him to enroll in the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Kirby lasted a week at Pratt, but in 1935 art proved to be his ticket out of Skid Row, when he landed a job drawing “in-betweeners” for Max Fleischer Studios’ animated cartoons. When labor troubles struck Fleischer Studios, Kirby found work with the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate in 1936, drawing comic strips. It was for Lincoln that he began using pen names, not to hide his Jewish heritage but to disguise the fact that he was working on multiple strips. He eventually settled on “Jack Kirby” because it sounded like the name of a professional cartoonist.

While working for Lincoln, Kirby also became a part of the studio of Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, where Kirby produced a comic-strip interpretation of The Count of Monte Cristo (based on Auguste Maquet’s 1844-1845 book Le Comte de Monte-cristo) under his Jack Curtiss pen name. When Kirby’s strips began appearing in the newly created comic-book market, it was not long before Kirby was hired to produce original material for this new narrative form.

Kirby was hired by Fox Syndicate in 1939, where he was introduced to the superhero narrative when he took over Fox’s star character, the Blue Beetle, one of the first comic-book superheroes. More important for the future of the industry was that, at Fox, Kirby partnered with Joe Simon.

Life’s Work

Simon and Kirby quickly became a dynamic duo, and they soon found themselves working for publisher Martin Goodman’s newly created Timely Comics (later Marvel), a company that was struggling to catch up with National (later DC) Comics’ latest sensation, Superman. In early 1941, Simon and Kirby’s first superhero creation, Captain America, gave Timely its first million-selling costumed crusader. The pair had arranged a lucrative deal with Timely: In addition to their salaries, Simon and Kirby were to receive 15 percent of the profits.

Soon it became clear to the pair that they were not getting the money that was owed them. So, they signed on with National/DC for a combined five hundred dollars a week. Their best-known work for National was the Boy Commandos series, which debuted in July, 1942.

Drafted on June 7, 1943, Kirby spent three years serving in World War II. He returned to his partnership with Simon in 1946, first working for Harvey Comics and launching the romance-comic genre with the publication of Young Romance in September, 1947, for Crestwood. The pair even launched their own line of comics under the imprint Mainline Publications, a project that ended in financial disarray.

Simon left comics in 1954 to work in advertising. Kirby continued to work, first with DC and then with Timely (then called Atlas), drawing science-fiction, horror, and monster tales. In 1961, Kirby helped change the rules of the comic-book industry again when he partnered with Marvel editor Stan Lee to produce Fantastic Four. The Lee-Kirby pairing created some of the most iconic characters of American popular culture: the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and the Avengers. Kirby’s artistic style, with exaggerated action, immediacy, and intensity of storytelling, meshed well with Lee’s belief that heroes should be real people with real problems. With this compelling combination of talents, the superhero comic was reborn.

Kirby’s method of laying out stories and his artistic style quickly became the Marvel way, as Lee pushed his entire “bullpen” of artists to emulate Kirby’s style. Kirby and Lee’s partnership turned Marvel into a multimillion-dollar corporation. However, in 1970, Kirby’s frustration with Marvel’s refusal to give him proper credit as coplotter and cocreator of most of the stars in the Marvel universe led him to leave, once again, for DC.

At DC, Kirby’s greatest contributions were the Fourth World titles, such as New Gods, and his take on the Superman continuity in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. He would return briefly to Marvel in 1976 before leaving comics in 1979 to return to animation.

Kirby worked with independent publishers in the 1980’s in order to bring about a new system of creative rights ownership, which allowed the comic’s creators, rather than the publishers, to own the rights to the characters the creators had crafted. This victory and other industry pressures resulted in Marvel returning much of Kirby’s original art to him in 1987. Kirby died of heart failure on February 6, 1994, at age seventy-six.

Significance

Kirby is called the king of comics not only because his style of storytelling helped to give birth to the superhero narrative in 1939 but also because his partnership with Lee reinvented the superhero narrative, invested it with a new life, and turned it into an art form. Kirby rewrote the static rules that bound the comic form to the page and allowed the story to break through the panel’s frame and “punch” the reader in the face. The characters he created—from the X-Men and Sergeant Fury to the Silver Surfer and Captain America—are icons and integral components of American popular culture. He cocreated an American mythology.

Bibliography

Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2008. Evanier, Kirby’s friend and biographer, established this work as a definitive study of Kirby’s life and work.

Morrow, John, ed. Kirby Five-Oh! Celebrating Fifty Years of the “King” of Comics. Raleigh, N.C.: TwoMorrows, 2008. A series of lists of the best of Kirby’s work, from covers to monsters.

Ro, Ronin. Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution! New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Ro examines how the working relationship between Lee and Kirby led to the rebirth of superhero comic books in the 1960’s.