Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby: The Man Who Drew the American Imagination

In 1962 alone he published 1,158 pages of comic art — more than three finished pages for every day of the year. Across his career the total came to at least 20,318 published pages and 1,385 covers. In 1985 Marvel Comics offered to return 88 of the original boards to him, less than one percent of what he had drawn, on condition that he sign away any claim to have created what he created. He called them thugs.

Essex Street

Jacob Kurtzberg was born on 28 August 1917 at 147 Essex Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the son of Rose and Benjamin Kurtzberg, Austrian Jewish immigrants; his father worked in a garment factory. The street was the education. Kirby's art would spend fifty years drawing men hitting each other, and it never looked like choreography, because he had learned what a punch actually was before he learned to draw one.

Formal training barely happened. He enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn at fourteen and lasted a week. "I wasn't the kind of student that Pratt was looking for," he said. He joined the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate in 1936 as Jack Curtiss, spent time at Fleischer Studios in 1939 as an inbetweener on Popeye cartoons before fleeing the factory conditions, and worked for the packager Eisner & Iger under a rotating cast of pen names — Curt Davis, Fred Sande, Ted Grey. He settled on Jack Kirby because it reminded him of James Cagney.

Simon and Kirby

At Fox Feature Syndicate he met Joe Simon. "I loved Jack's work," Simon recalled, "and the first time I saw it I couldn't believe what I was seeing." The partnership ran for roughly twenty-five years.

In late 1940 they created Captain America. The first issue sold out in days; the second had a print run over a million. Simon negotiated a 25 percent share of profits from publisher Martin Goodman, and when that money did not materialise the pair walked to National Comics — later DC — for a combined $500 a week, against the $75 to $85 each they had been getting. There they produced the Boy Commandos, which sold over a million copies a month and became National's third best-selling title.

Omaha Beach

Kirby was drafted on 7 June 1943 and landed at Omaha Beach on 23 August 1944 with Company F of the 11th Infantry Regiment. His job was scout: he was sent ahead of the line to draw reconnaissance maps of towns. In the winter of 1944 he suffered frostbite severe enough that doctors in London discussed amputating his legs. He kept them, and was discharged on 20 July 1945 with the Combat Infantryman Badge.

He had married Rosalind Goldstein on 23 May 1942 and corresponded with her by v-mail from France. They had four children, bought a house in East Williston on Long Island in 1949, and Kirby worked from a ten-foot-wide basement studio he called the Dungeon.

The Romance Racket

The next act is the one people forget, and it is the strongest single proof of his inventiveness. In 1947, with superheroes in decline, Simon and Kirby looked at the confessional magazine *True Story* and invented an entire comics genre. *Young Romance* #1, cover-dated October 1947, sold 92 percent of its print run; the third issue's print run tripled. With its spin-off *Young Love* it was moving two million copies a month and had spawned dozens of imitators. Kirby, who is remembered for gods and monsters, also invented the romance comic.

The Marvel Age

He returned to Marvel's predecessor Atlas in the late 1950s, survived the 1957 implosion that halted his assignments for months, and then, in November 1961, co-created *Fantastic Four* #1 with Stan Lee. What followed over a decade is without parallel in commercial art: the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, Magneto, Doctor Doom, the Avengers, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, Ant-Man, and Black Panther, comics' first Black superhero. The Galactus Trilogy in *Fantastic Four* #48–50 in 1966 is routinely named the peak of the Lee–Kirby collaboration.

The visual language was his. Figures burst out of panels and lunge at the reader in violent foreshortening; energy is rendered in the black dots now universally called Kirby Krackle; covers and interiors incorporate photo-collage. Marvel's house style was, quite literally, Kirby's — Lee had other artists study his page breakdowns. "Jack was the single most influential figure in the turnaround in Marvel's fortunes," said the artist Gil Kane.

The Break

He was earning about $35,000 a year as a freelancer and getting almost no credit. Under the Marvel Method he plotted and paced stories that were published as Lee's. In 1970, presented with an unfavourable contract by a management that bluntly told him Lee was solely responsible for Marvel's success, he left for DC.

There he was given something he had never had: total control. The Fourth World — *New Gods*, *Mister Miracle*, *The Forever People* and a hijacked *Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen* — is a single interlocking mythology about the war between New Genesis and Apokolips, and it introduced Darkseid, now one of DC's central figures. Grant Morrison wrote that the saga "crackles with the voltage of Jack Kirby's boundless imagination let loose onto paper." It also flopped and was cancelled. Kirby, unhurt, produced *Kamandi*, *OMAC* and *The Demon*, and proposed the trade paperback format, which DC largely rejected.

Why Jack Is Called a Genius

The faculty is twofold and both halves are unusual. The first is invention at industrial volume — not one good idea but hundreds, generated under deadline for a disposable medium, in genres as far apart as cosmic myth and teenage heartbreak. The second is that he built a visual grammar from nothing. Before Kirby, comic panels were windows; after him they were impacts. Brent Staples wrote in the *New York Times* that he "created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of motion."

Serious people have used the word. Britannica calls him one of the most prolific and influential creators in the history of comics. The scholars Charles Hatfield and Ben Saunders named him one of the chief architects of the American imagination. Michael Chabon acknowledged a deep debt to "the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics" in a Pulitzer-winning novel.

The counter-case is honest. His prose was often clumsy and his dialogue stilted; the style has been fairly described as deliberately primitive and bombastic. His most celebrated work is collaborative, and the exact division of authorship between him, Simon and Lee is contested and probably unresolvable. His one great solo statement, the Fourth World, failed commercially. And the courts, in 2011 and again in 2013, held that he was a work-for-hire employee with no ownership at all. Kirby's genius was that of a jazz musician or a folk architect — enormous, generative, uneven, and largely uncredited in its own time.

The King

He left Marvel again in the late 1970s after a return that produced *The Eternals*, *Machine Man*, *Devil Dinosaur* and an expansion of *2001: A Space Odyssey*, plus a last Lee collaboration that became Marvel's first graphic novel. He designed for Ruby-Spears animation and in the early 1980s cut some of the first creator-owned deals in the business at Pacific and Eclipse — precedents that helped break the work-for-hire monopoly for everyone who came after.

He was among the three inaugural inductees to the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1987, and was named a Disney Legend in 2017. He died of heart failure on 6 February 1994 in Thousand Oaks, California, aged seventy-six. On 26 September 2014, twenty years after his death, his children reached a settlement with Marvel. Fans had a name for him long before the lawyers did: the King.

Achievements

• Jack Kirby Hall of Fame — 1987
• Notable work: Captain America
• Notable work: The Fantastic Four
• Notable work: Hulk
• Notable work: Avengers
• Worked as penciller, inker and comics writer