Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby[1] (born Jacob Kurtzberg; August 28, 1917 – February 6, 1994) was an American comic book artist, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. He grew up in New York City and learned 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 writer-editor 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.
For other people named Jack Kirby, see Jack Kirby (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Jack Kilby or Josh Kirby.Jack Kirby
Jacob Kurtzberg
August 28, 1917
New York City, U.S.
February 6, 1994 (aged 76)
Thousand Oaks, California, U.S.
- Jack Curtiss
- Curt Davis
- Lance Kirby
- Ted Grey
- Charles Nicholas
- Fred Sande
- Teddy
- The King
4
After serving in the European Theater 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 short-lived comic company, Mainline Publications. Kirby was involved in Timely's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics, which in the next decade became Marvel. There, in the 1960s, Kirby cocreated many of the company's major characters, including Ant-Man, the Avengers, the Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, Thor, and the X-Men, among many others. Kirby's 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 comics titles. While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were canceled, the Fourth World's New Gods have continued as a significant part of the DC Universe. Kirby returned to Marvel briefly in the mid-to-late 1970s, then ventured into television animation and independent comics. In his later years, Kirby, who has been called "the William Blake of comics",[2] 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 Company's 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 honor, and he is known as "The King" among comics fans for his many influential contributions to the medium.
Early life (1917–1935)[edit]
Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, at 147 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City; he grew up there.[3] His parents, Rose (Bernstein) and Benjamin Kurtzberg,[3] were Austrian-Jewish immigrants, and his father earned a living as a garment factory worker.[4] Kirby grew up in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. Among his close friends was Leon Klinghoffer, who grew up in the same neighborhood, and who in 1985 was shot, killed and thrown overboard from the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian Liberation Front hijackers.[5][6] In his youth, Kirby desired to escape his neighborhood. He liked to draw, and sought out places he could learn more about art.[7] Essentially self-taught,[8] Kirby cited among his influences the comic strip artists Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and Alex Raymond, as well as such editorial cartoonists as C. H. Sykes, "Ding" Darling, and Rollin Kirby.[8] He was rejected by the Educational Alliance because he drew "too fast with charcoal", according to Kirby. He later found an outlet for his skills by drawing cartoons for the newspaper of the Boys Brotherhood Republic, a "miniature city" on East 3rd Street where street kids ran their own government.[9]
At age 14, Kirby enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, leaving after a week. "I wasn't the kind of student that Pratt was looking for. They wanted people who would work on something forever. I didn't want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done".[10]
Personal life and death[edit]
In the early 1940s, Kirby and his family moved to Brooklyn. Kirby met Rosalind "Roz" Goldstein, who lived in the same Brooklyn apartment building. The pair began dating soon afterward.[156] Kirby proposed to Goldstein on her 18th birthday, and the two became engaged.[157] They married on May 23, 1942.[158] The couple had four children: Susan (b. December 6, 1945),[159] Neal (b. May 1948),[40] Barbara (b. November 1952),[160] and Lisa (b. September 1960).[159][161]
After being drafted into the U.S. Army and serving in the European Theater in World War II,[162] Kirby corresponded with his wife regularly by v-mail, with Roz sending daily letters while she worked in a lingerie shop and lived with her mother[163] at 2820 Brighton 7th Street in Brooklyn.[164] During the winter of 1944, Kirby suffered severe frostbite and was taken to a hospital in London for recovery. Doctors considered amputating Kirby's legs, which had turned black, but he eventually recovered and was able to walk again.[165] He returned to the United States in January 1945, assigned to Camp Butner in North Carolina, where he spent the last six months of his service as part of the motor pool. Kirby was honorably discharged as a private first class on July 20, 1945, having received a Combat Infantryman Badge, a European/African/Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with a bronze Battle Star.[166][167]
In 1949, Kirby bought a house for his family in Mineola, New York on Long Island.[40] It was the family's home for the next 20 years; Kirby worked out of a basement studio just 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, which the family referred to jocularly as "The Dungeon".[168] He moved the family to Southern California in early 1969, both to live in a drier climate for the sake of daughter Lisa's health, and to be closer to the Hollywood studios Jack Kirby believed might provide work.[169]
In an interview, Kirby's granddaughter Jillian Kirby said Jack Kirby was a "liberal Democrat".[170] Jack Kirby held anti-communist views, once saying that "I was against the reds. I became a witch hunter. My enemies were the commies—I called them commies. In fact, Granny Goodness was a commie, Doubleheader was a commie."[171]
On February 6, 1994, aged 76, Kirby died of heart failure in his Thousand Oaks, California home.[172] He was buried at Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village, California.
Jack Kirby received a great deal of recognition over the course of his career, including the 1967 Alley Award for Best Pencil Artist.[265] The following year he was runner-up behind Jim Steranko. His other Alley Awards were:
Kirby won a Shazam Award for Special Achievement by an Individual in 1971 for his "Fourth World" series in Forever People, New Gods, Mister Miracle, and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen.[271] He received an Inkpot Award in 1974[272] and was inducted into the Shazam Awards Hall of Fame in 1975.[273] In 1987 he was an inaugural inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.[274] He received the 1993 Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award at that year's Eisner Awards.[275]
His work was honored posthumously in 1998: The collection of his New Gods material, Jack Kirby's New Gods, edited by Bob Kahan, won both the Harvey Award for Best Domestic Reprint Project,[276] and the Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project.[277] On July 14, 2017, Jack Kirby was named a Disney Legend for his part in the creation of numerous characters that would comprise Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe.[278]
The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall of Fame were named in his honor.[279][280][281] He was the posthumous recipient of the Bill Finger Award in 2017.[282]
With Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Gary Panter and Chris Ware, Kirby was among the artists honored in the exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Jewish Museum in New York City from September 16, 2006, to January 28, 2007.[283][284]
Asteroid 51985 Kirby, discovered September 22, 2001, was named in his honor.[285] A crater on Mercury, located near the north pole, was named in his honor in 2019.[286]