Born Jacob Kurtzburg on August 28, 1917, to Jewish immigrant parents from Austria who relocated to the Lower East Side of New York City, Jack “The King” Kirby started as a young, working-class, talented self-taught artist and became one of the comic book industry’s most prolific, innovative, and influential creators. Yet, Kirby didn’t initially make his break as an artist in comic books; instead, it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that he found work as a cartoon strip artist at the Lincoln News Syndicate followed by a brief stint at the Fleischman Animation Studios working on Popeye cartoons. At the same time, Kirby began working in the Eisner & Iger studio under various pen names, which included Curt Davis, Jack Curtiss, Fred Sande, and others. However, in 1939 “Jack Kirby” emerged as his final and best-known pseudonym when he began working at Fox Feature Syndicate—the place where he found a foothold in superhero comics with The Blue Beetle and met his longtime friend and collaborator, Joe Simon.
Comic book artist Jack “The King” Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzburg, 1917–1994) is celebrated at the CSUN Art Galleries with an exhibition titled Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby. Widely regarded as “The King of Comics,” Kirby was co-creator of the Avengers, X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider Man, and many other iconic comic book heroes that extended and revised American notions of the heroic. Although his relationship with fellow comics icon Stan Lee was short-lived and tortured, the two together have had a significant and lasting impact upon American popular culture. (Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Corbis)
Kirby and Simon left Fox in late 1940 to join the staff of Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics publishing company, and it was here that their most successful and long-lasting collaboration was born: Captain America. Captain America Comics was originally marked for publication in March 1941 but appeared on newsstands and in readers’ hands in December 1940 during the rising tensions of World War II (most comics in the 1940s through 1960s were commonly available up to three months before their publication date). Joe and Jack’s run on Captain America Comics was short-lived, however, due to remuneration disputes with Goodman, for which Kirby and Simon felt Stan Lee was responsible, and they left to work at DC Comics.
In 1942, Kirby met his wife, Roz, with whom he would raise a family. Not long after getting married, Kirby found himself drafted into the Army, where he was involved in combat operations within the European theater. Upon returning home, Kirby and Simon bounced between various jobs—both at DC and Timely (now renamed Atlas Comics)—as well as starting series of their own. Like many other comics creators of the time, however, much of their success took place outside of the superhero genre.
It wasn’t until DC began finding increased success and reader interest with its rebooting of Golden Age superheroes, as seen with Carmine Infantino’s The Flash in Showcase #4 (October 1956) and later with the development of The Justice League in Brave and the Bold #28 (March 1960), that Marvel Comics tapped Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to begin experimenting in the genre once again. In spite of Kirby’s distrust of Lee over the poor treatment he and Simon received from Timely during their short tenure on Captain America—something for which both creators blamed Lee—the two set to work on reinventing the superhero genre starting with Fantastic Four #1 from November 1961. In only a few short years, Kirby and Lee created characters such as The Hulk, The X-Men, Iron Man, and The Silver Surfer. This period ushered in the Marvel Age of Comics, which included many other supporting characters who continue to enjoy popularity in comics even into the present day.
This creative burst did not last long, however, as Kirby’s dissatisfaction with Lee continued to grow. While Stan Lee rose to prominence within the company as editor-in-chief and eventually publisher as well as outside of Marvel in various media venues, Jack Kirby continued to bristle under a lack of published credit and equitable remuneration for the work he performed—not only as an artist, but also as a co-creator, co-plotter, and at times, even scripter of the characters who were making Marvel famous worldwide. This led Kirby back to DC Comics for the first half of the 1970s, where he went on to produce the cosmic pantheon of The New Gods, which included the popular Superman foe, Darkseid, as well as other characters such as The Demon and Kamandi. By 1975, however, Kirby was back at Marvel Comics for a few short years. He brought both his flair for science fiction in titles like The Eternals and Machine Man and his desire to return to Captain America with more creative and editorial control than he experienced before, even if his tenure was short-lived.
During Kirby’s final years in comics, he worked occasionally with DC and Marvel, but as in the past, these relationships proved to be short-lived. He also published books through smaller comic publishing companies such as Pacific and Topps, but at no point did his work reach the same heights that he achieved with DC and Marvel. In 1987, Jack Kirby retired from comics and on February 4, 1994, he died in his home in California. Today, creators in the comics publishing industry often point to Jack “The King” Kirby as an example of an artist who spent most of his life laboring under a work-for-hire contract, became one of the most significant figures in the business, upon whose back billions of dollars of revenue have been earned, and yet died without seeing a fraction of the profits of the fruits of his labor. Nevertheless, his work contributed to the shaping of an imagined world of mythological heroes and legends that has been a dominant force in modern American popular culture.
Forrest C. Helvie
See also DC Comics; Lee, Stan; Marvel Comics; Spider Man; Superman
Further Reading
Bell, Blake, and Michael J. Vassallo. 2013. The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman’s Empire. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.
Evanier, Mark. 2008. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams.
Howe, Sean. 2012. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: HarperCollins.
Jones, Gerard. 2004. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books.
Schelly, Bill. 2013. American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1950s. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows.