Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby born Jacob Kurtzberg August 28 1917 February 6 1994 was an American comic book artist widely regarded as one of the mediums major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators He grew up in New York City and learnt to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s drawing various comics features under different pen names including Jack Curtiss before settling on Jack Kirby In 1940 he and writereditor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics predecessor of Marvel Comics During the 1940s Kirby regularly teamed with Simon creating numerous characters for that company and for National Comics Publications later to become DC Comics After serving in the European Theatre in World War II Kirby produced work for DC Comics Harvey Comics Hillman Periodicals and other publishers At Crestwood Publications he and Simon created the genre of romance comics and later founded their own shortlived comic company Mainline Publications Kirby was involved in Timelys 1950s iteration Atlas Comics which in the next decade became Marvel There in the 1960s Kirby cocreated many of the companys major characters including AntMan the Avengers the Black Panther the Fantastic Four the Hulk Iron Man the Silver Surfer Thor and the XMen among many others Kirbys titles garnered high sales and critical acclaim but in 1970 feeling he had been treated unfairly largely in the realm of authorship credit and creators rights Kirby left the company for rival DC At DC Kirby created his Fourth World saga which spanned several comic titles While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were cancelled the Fourth Worlds New Gods have continued as a significant part of the DC Universe Kirby returned to Marvel briefly in the midtolate 1970s and then ventured into television animation and independent comics In his later years Kirby who has been called the William Blake of comics began receiving great recognition in the mainstream press for his career accomplishments and in 1987 he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame In 2017 Kirby was posthumously named a Disney Legend for his creations not only in the field of publishing but also because those creations formed the basis for The Walt Disney Companys financially and critically successful media franchise the Marvel Cinematic Universe Kirby was married to Rosalind Goldstein in 1942 They had four children and remained married until his death from heart failure in 1994 at the age of 76 The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall of Fame were named in his honour and he is known as The King among comics fans for his many influential contributions to the medium Description above from the Wikipedia article Jack Kirby licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia