JACK KIRBY
Jack kirby’s art defined the Marvel Universe... and so much more. Joseph McCabe celebrates the King of Comics’ centenary year
There probably wouldn’t even be an MCU without this guy. In time for his centenary, we celebrate the most legendary of comic book artists.
It’s fitting that Jack Kirby was nicknamed “The King.” For, just like Elvis Presley, he gave his medium dimension, defined it, and ultimately turned it into an art form.
The man who would be King was born Jacob Kurtzberg, one hundred years ago, on August 28, 1917. Growing up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the Great Depression, he escaped his rough-and-tumble environment via stories of adventure and the fantastic – like those of Edgar Rice Burroughs and HG Wells – and newspaper comic strips like Dick Tracy and Terry
And The Pirates. A self-taught artist who learned to draw by borrowing how-to books from his local library, he started his career at 18 with a job at a newspaper syndicate, then found work as an animator at the Max Fleischer Studios drawing Popeye and Betty Boop. But he was unhappy with animation’s assembly-line process, and left Fleischer for Fox Comics and a job as an assistant artist on Blue Beetle.
In comics, Kirby found fertile ground and freedom, and the opportunity to innovate. Partnering with Fox editor Joe Simon, he joined Timely, which would later become Marvel. There, the two created a handful of characters, the most iconic of which was the star-spangled Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America, who debuted in March 1941’s Captain
America Comics #1; released a full year before America entered World War II.
“Captain America’s a tough act to follow,” says Mark Evanier, Kirby’s production assistant in the ’70s and author of the newly reprinted Eisner Award-winning Kirby: King
Of Comics. “But one of the neat things about Jack is he loved everything he did, just about. Once in a while he didn’t like the people he was working with or the working conditions. But when they said, ‘Do some war comics for us,’ he happily