Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg, was an American
comic book artist, writer and editor regarded
by historians and fans as one of the major
innovators and most influential creators in
the comic book medium.
Kirby grew up poor 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 and drew various comics features
under different pen names, including Jack
Curtiss, ultimately 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,
generally teamed with Simon, created numerous
characters for that company and for National
Comics, the company that later became DC Comics.
After serving in World War II, Kirby returned
to comics and worked in a variety of genres.
He produced work for a number of publishers,
including DC, Harvey Comics, Hillman Periodicals
and Crestwood Publications, where he and Simon
created the genre of romance comics. He and
Simon launched their own short-lived comic
company, Mainline Publications. Kirby ultimately
found himself at Timely's 1950s iteration,
Atlas Comics, soon to become Marvel. There,
in the 1960s, he and writer-editor Stan Lee
co-created many of Marvel's major characters,
including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and
the Hulk. Despite the high sales and critical
acclaim of the Lee-Kirby titles, Kirby felt
treated unfairly, and left the company in
1970 for rival DC.
There 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",
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.
Kirby was married to Rosalind "Roz" 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.
Life and career
Early life
Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August
28, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
in New York City, where he was raised. His
parents, Rose and Benjamin Kurtzberg, were
Austrian Jewish immigrants, and his father
earned a living as a garment factory worker.
In his youth, Kirby desired to escape his
neighborhood. He liked to draw, and sought
out places he could learn more about art.
Essentially self-taught, 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. 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.
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".
Entry into comics
Kirby joined the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate
in 1936, working there on newspaper comic
strips and on single-panel advice cartoons
such as Your Health Comes First!!!. He remained
until late 1939, when he began working for
the movie animation company Fleischer Studios
as an inbetweener on Popeye cartoons. "I went
from Lincoln to Fleischer," he recalled. "From
Fleischer I had to get out in a hurry because
I couldn't take that kind of thing," describing
it as "a factory in a sense, like my father's
factory. They were manufacturing pictures."
Around that time, the American comic book
industry was booming. Kirby began writing
and drawing for the comic-book packager Eisner
& Iger, one of a handful of firms creating
comics on demand for publishers. Through that
company, Kirby did what he remembers as his
first comic book work, for Wild Boy Magazine.
This included such strips as the science fiction
adventure "The Diary of Dr. Hayward", the
Western crimefighter feature "Wilton of the
West", the swashbuckler adventure "The Count
of Monte Cristo", and the humor features "Abdul
Jones" and '"Socko the Seadog", all variously
for Jumbo Comics and other Eisner-Iger clients.
He first used the surname Kirby as the pseudonymous
Lance Kirby in two "Lone Rider" Western stories
in Eastman Color's Famous Funnies #63-64.
He ultimately settled on the pen name Jack
Kirby because it reminded him of actor James
Cagney. However, he took offense to those
who suggested he changed his name in order
to hide his Jewish heritage.
In the summer of 1940, Kirby and his family
moved to Brooklyn. There, Kirby met Rosalind
"Roz" Goldstein, who lived in the same apartment
building. The pair began dating soon afterward.
Kirby proposed to Goldstein on her eighteenth
birthday, and the two became engaged.
Partnership with Joe Simon
Kirby moved on to comic-book publisher and
newspaper syndicator Fox Feature Syndicate,
earning a then-reasonable $15-a-week salary.
He began to explore superhero narrative with
the comic strip The Blue Beetle, published
from January to March 1940, starring a character
created by the pseudonymous Charles Nicholas,
a house name that Kirby retained for the three-month-long
strip. During this time, Kirby met and began
collaborating with cartoonist and Fox editor
Joe Simon, who in addition to his staff work
continued to freelance. Simon recalled in
1988, "I loved Jack's work and the first time
I saw it I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
He asked if we could do some freelance work
together. I was delighted and I took him over
to my little office. We worked from the second
issue of Blue Bolt through... about 25 years."
After leaving Fox and landing at pulp magazine
publisher Martin Goodman's Timely Comics,
Simon and Kirby created the patriotic superhero
Captain America in late 1940. Simon cut a
deal with Goodman that gave him and Kirby
25 percent of the profits from the feature,
as well as salaried positions as the company's
editor and art director, respectively. The
first issue of Captain America Comics, released
in early 1941, sold out in days, and the second
issue's print run was set at over a million
copies. The title's success established the
team as a notable creative force in the industry.
After the first issue was published, Simon
asked Kirby to join the Timely staff as the
company's art director.
With the success of the Captain America character,
Simon felt that Goodman was not paying the
pair the promised percentage of profits, and
so sought work for the two of them at National
Comics. Kirby and Simon negotiated a deal
that would pay them a combined $500 a week,
as opposed to the $75 and $85 they respectively
earned at Timely. Fearing that Goodman would
not pay them if he found out they were moving
to National, the pair kept the deal a secret
with Stan Lee while they continued producing
work for the company. Goodman eventually learned
of the deal, and Kirby and Simon, convinced
that Lee had revealed their plans, left after
completing their work on Captain America Comics
#10.
Kirby and Simon spent their first weeks at
National trying to devise new characters while
the company sought how best to utilize the
pair. After a few failed editor-assigned ghosting
assignments, National's Jack Liebowitz told
them to "just do what you want". The pair
then revamped the Sandman feature in Adventure
Comics and created the superhero Manhunter.
In July 1942 they began the Boy Commandos
feature. The ongoing "kid gang" series of
the same name, launched later that same year,
was the creative team's first National feature
to graduate into its own title. It sold over
a million copies a month, becoming National's
third best-selling title. They scored a hit
with the homefront kid-gang team, the Newsboy
Legion, featuring in Star-Spangled Comics.
In 2010, DC Comics writer and executive Paul
Levitz observed that "Like Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster, the creative team of Joe Simon
and Jack Kirby was a mark of quality and a
proven track record."
Marriage and World War II
Kirby married Roz Goldstein on May 23, 1942.
With World War II underway, Liebowitz expected
that Simon and Kirby would be drafted, so
he asked the artists to create an inventory
of material to be published in their absence.
The pair hired writers, inkers, letterers,
and colorists in order to create a year's
worth of material. Kirby was drafted into
the U.S. Army on June 7, 1943. After basic
training at Camp Stewart, near Savannah, Georgia,
he was assigned to Company F of the 11th Infantry
Regiment. He landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy
on August 23, 1944, two-and-a-half months
after D-Day, though Kirby's reminiscences
would place his arrival just 10 days after.
Kirby recalled that a lieutenant, learning
that comics artist Kirby was in his command,
made him a scout who would advance into towns
and draw reconnaissance maps and pictures,
an extremely dangerous duty.
Kirby and his wife corresponded regularly
by v-mail, with Roz sending "him a letter
a day" while she worked in a lingerie shop
and lived with her mother at 2820 Brighton
7th Street in Brooklyn. During the winter
of 1944, Kirby suffered severe frostbite on
his lower extremities and was taken to a hospital
in London, England, for recovery. Doctors
considered amputating Kirby's legs, but he
eventually recovered from the frostbite. 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 and a EuropeanMiddle Eastern
Theater ribbon with a bronze battle star.
Postwar career
Simon arranged for work for Kirby and himself
at Harvey Comics, where, through the early
1950s, the duo created such titles as the
kid-gang adventure Boy Explorers Comics, the
kid-gang Western Boys' Ranch, the superhero
comic Stuntman, and, in vogue with the fad
for 3-D movies, Captain 3-D. Simon and Kirby
additionally freelanced for Hillman Periodicals
and for Crestwood Publications.
The team found its greatest success in the
postwar period by creating romance comics.
Simon, inspired by Macfadden Publications'
romantic-confession magazine True Story, transplanted
the idea to comic books and with Kirby created
a first-issue mock-up of Young Romance. Showing
it to Crestwood general manager Maurice Rosenfeld,
Simon asked for 50% of the comic's profits.
Crestwood publishers Teddy Epstein and Mike
Bleier agreed, stipulating that the creators
would take no money up front. Young Romance
#1 "became Jack and Joe's biggest hit in years".
Indeed, the pioneering title sold a staggering
92% of its print run, inspiring Crestwood
to increase the print run by the third issue
to triple the initial number of copies. Initially
published bimonthly, Young Romance quickly
became a monthly title and produced the spin-off
Young Love—together the two titles sold
two million copies per month, according to
Simon—later joined by Young Brides and In
Love, the latter "featuring full-length romance
stories". Young Romance spawned dozens of
imitators from publishers such as Timely,
Fawcett, Quality, and Fox Feature Syndicate.
Despite the glut, the Simon & Kirby romance
titles continued to sell millions of copies
a month, which allowed Kirby to buy a house
for his family in Mineola, Long Island, New
York in 1949, which would be the family's
home for the next 20 years, working out of
a basement studio 10 feet in width, which
the family referred to as "The Dungeon".
Bitter that Timely Comics' 1950s iteration,
Atlas Comics, had relaunched Captain America
in a new series in 1954, Kirby and Simon created
Fighting American. Simon recalled, "We thought
we'd show them how to do Captain America".
While the comic book initially portrayed the
protagonist as an anti-Communist dramatic
hero, Simon and Kirby turned the series into
a superhero satire with the second issue,
in the aftermath of the Army-McCarthy hearings
and the public backlash against the Red-baiting
U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy.
After Simon
At the urging of a Crestwood salesman, Kirby
and Simon launched their own comics company,
Mainline Publications, securing a distribution
deal with Leader News in late 1953 or early
1954, subletting space from their friend Al
Harvey's Harvey Publications at 1860 Broadway.
Mainline, which existed from 1954 to 1955,
published four titles: the Western Bullseye:
Western Scout; the war comic Foxhole, since
EC Comics and Atlas Comics were having success
with war comics, but promoting theirs as being
written and drawn by actual veterans; In Love,
since their earlier romance comic Young Love
was still being widely imitated; and the crime
comic Police Trap, which claimed to be based
on genuine accounts by law-enforcement officials.
After the duo rearranged and republished artwork
from an old Crestwood story in In Love, Crestwood
refused to pay the team, who sought an audit
of Crestwood's finances. Upon review, the
pair's attorney's stated the company owed
them $130,000 for work done over the past
seven years. Crestwood paid them $10,000 in
addition to their recent delayed payments.
The partnership between Kirby and Simon had
become strained. Simon left the industry for
a career in advertising, while Kirby continued
to freelance. "He wanted to do other things
and I stuck with comics," Kirby recalled in
1971. "It was fine. There was no reason to
continue the partnership and we parted friends."
At this point in the mid-1950s, Kirby made
a temporary return to the former Timely Comics,
now known as Atlas Comics, the direct predecessor
of Marvel Comics. Inker Frank Giacoia had
approached editor-in-chief Stan Lee for work
and suggested he could "get Kirby back here
to pencil some stuff." While freelancing for
National Comics, the future DC Comics, Kirby
drew 20 stories for Atlas from 1956 to 1957:
Beginning with the five-page "Mine Field"
in Battleground #14, Kirby penciled and in
some cases inked and wrote stories of the
Western hero Black Rider, the Fu Manchu-like
Yellow Claw, and more. But in 1957, distribution
troubles caused the "Atlas implosion" that
resulted in several series being dropped and
no new material being assigned for many months.
It would be the following year before Kirby
returned to the nascent Marvel.
For DC around this time, Kirby co-created
with writers Dick and Dave Wood the non-superpowered
adventuring quartet the Challengers of the
Unknown in Showcase #6, while contributing
to such anthologies as House of Mystery. During
30 months freelancing for DC, Kirby drew slightly
more than 600 pages, which included 11 six-page
Green Arrow stories in World's Finest Comics
and Adventure Comics that, in a rarity, Kirby
inked himself. Kirby recast the archer as
a science-fiction hero, moving him away from
his Batman-formula roots, but in the process
alienating Green Arrow co-creator Mort Weisinger.
He began drawing a newspaper comic strip,
Sky Masters of the Space Force, written by
the Wood brothers and initially inked by the
unrelated Wally Wood. Kirby left National
Comics due largely to a contractual dispute
in which editor Jack Schiff, who had been
involved in getting Kirby and the Wood brothers
the Sky Masters contract, claimed he was due
royalties from Kirby's share of the strip's
profits. Schiff successfully sued Kirby. Some
DC editors had criticized him over art details,
such as not drawing "the shoelaces on a cavalryman's
boots" and showing a Native American "mounting
his horse from the wrong side."
Marvel Comics in the Silver Age
Several months later, after his split with
DC, Kirby began freelancing regularly for
Atlas in spite of his lingering resentment
of Lieber's earlier treatment of him in the
1940s. Because of the poor page rates, Kirby
would spend 12 to 14 hours daily at his drawing
table at home, producing eight to ten pages
of artwork a day. His first published work
at Atlas was the cover of and the seven-page
story "I Discovered the Secret of the Flying
Saucers" in Strange Worlds #1. Initially with
Christopher Rule as his regular inker, and
later Dick Ayers, Kirby drew across all genres,
from romance comics to war comics to crime
comics to Westerns, but made his mark primarily
with a series of supernatural-fantasy and
science fiction stories featuring giant, drive-in
movie-style monsters with names like Groot,
the Thing from Planet X; Grottu, King of the
Insects; and Fin Fang Foom for the company's
many anthology series, such as Amazing Adventures,
Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of
Suspense, and World of Fantasy. His bizarre
designs of powerful, unearthly creatures proved
a hit with readers. Additionally, he freelanced
for Archie Comics' around this time, reuniting
briefly with Joe Simon to help develop the
series The Fly and The Double Life of Private
Strong. Additionally, Kirby drew some issues
of Classics Illustrated.
It was at Marvel with writer and editor-in-chief
Lee that Kirby hit his stride once again in
superhero comics, beginning with The Fantastic
Four #1. The landmark series became a hit
that revolutionized the industry with its
comparative naturalism and, eventually, a
cosmic purview informed by Kirby's seemingly
boundless imagination—one well-matched with
the consciousness-expanding youth culture
of the 1960s.
For almost a decade, Kirby provided Marvel's
house style, co-creating with Stan Lee many
of the Marvel characters and designing their
visual motifs. At Lee's request, he often
provided new-to-Marvel artists "breakdown"
layouts, over which they would pencil in order
to become acquainted with the Marvel look.
As artist Gil Kane described:
Jack was the single most influential figure
in the turnaround in Marvel's fortunes from
the time he rejoined the company ... It wasn't
merely that Jack conceived most of the characters
that are being done, but ... Jack's point
of view and philosophy of drawing became the
governing philosophy of the entire publishing
company and, beyond the publishing company,
of the entire field ... [Marvel took] Jack
and use[d] him as a primer. They would get
artists ... and they taught them the ABCs,
which amounted to learning Jack Kirby. ... Jack
was like the Holy Scripture and they simply
had to follow him without deviation. That's
what was told to me ... It was how they taught
everyone to reconcile all those opposing attitudes
to one single master point of view.
Highlights other than the Fantastic Four include:
the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the original X-Men,
Doctor Doom, Uatu the Watcher, Magneto, Ego
the Living Planet, the Inhumans and the Black
Panther, and their hidden city of Attilan,
and the Black Panther—comics' first known
black superhero—and his African nation of
Wakanda. Kirby drew the first Spider-Man story
intended for publication in Amazing Fantasy
#15 but Stan Lee chose to have Steve Ditko
redraw the story. Lee and Kirby gathered several
of their newly created characters together
into the team title The Avengers and would
revive characters from the 1940s such as the
Sub-Mariner, Captain America, and Ka-Zar.
The story frequently cited as Lee and Kirby's
finest achievement is the three-part "The
Galactus Trilogy" that began in Fantastic
Four #48, chronicling the arrival of Galactus,
a cosmic giant who wanted to devour the planet,
and his herald, the Silver Surfer. Fantastic
Four #48 was chosen as #24 in the 100 Greatest
Marvels of All Time poll of Marvel's readers
in 2001. Editor Robert Greenberger wrote in
his introduction to the story that "As the
fourth year of the Fantastic Four came to
a close, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby seemed to
be only warming up. In retrospect, it was
perhaps the most fertile period of any monthly
title during the Marvel Age." Comics historian
Les Daniels noted that "[t]he mystical and
metaphysical elements that took over the saga
were perfectly suited to the tastes of young
readers in the 1960s", and Lee soon discovered
that the story was a favorite on college campuses.
In 1968 and 1969, Joe Simon was involved in
litigation with Marvel Comics over the ownership
of Captain America, initiated by Marvel after
Simon registered the copyright renewal for
Captain America in his own name. According
to Simon, Kirby agreed to support the company
in the litigation and, as part of a deal Kirby
made with publisher Martin Goodman, signed
over to Marvel any rights he might have had
to the character.
Kirby continued to expand the medium's boundaries,
devising photo-collage covers and interiors,
developing new drawing techniques such as
the method for depicting energy fields now
known as "Kirby Dots", and other experiments.
Yet he grew increasingly dissatisfied with
working at Marvel. There have been a number
of reasons given for this dissatisfaction,
including resentment over Stan Lee's increasing
media prominence, a lack of full creative
control, anger over breaches of perceived
promises by publisher Martin Goodman, and
frustration over Marvel's failure to credit
him specifically for his story plotting and
for his character creations and co-creations.
He began to both script and draw some secondary
features for Marvel, such as "The Inhumans"
in Amazing Adventures, as well as horror stories
for the anthology title Chamber of Darkness,
and received full credit for doing so; but
in 1970, Kirby was presented with a contract
that included such unfavorable terms as a
prohibition against legal retaliation. When
Kirby objected, the management refused to
negotiate any contract changes. Kirby, although
he was earning $35,000 a year freelancing
for the company, subsequently left Marvel
in 1970 for rival DC Comics, under editorial
director Carmine Infantino.
DC Comics and the Fourth World saga
Kirby spent nearly two years negotiating a
deal to move to DC Comics, where in late 1970
he signed a three-year contract with an option
for two additional years. He produced a series
of interlinked titles under the blanket sobriquet
"The Fourth World", which included a trilogy
of new titles — New Gods, Mister Miracle,
and The Forever People — as well as the
extant Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Kirby picked
the latter book because the series was without
a stable creative team and he did not want
to cost anyone a job. The central villain
of the Fourth World series, Darkseid, and
some of the Fourth World concepts, appeared
in Jimmy Olsen before the launch of the other
Fourth World books, giving the new titles
greater exposure to potential buyers. The
Superman figures and Jimmy Olsen faces drawn
by Kirby were redrawn by Al Plastino, and
later by Murphy Anderson. Les Daniels observed
in 1995 that "Kirby's mix of slang and myth,
science fiction and the Bible, made for a
heady brew, but the scope of his vision has
endured."In 2007, comics writer Grant Morrison
commented that "Kirby's dramas were staged
across Jungian vistas of raw symbol and storm...The
Fourth World saga crackles with the voltage
of Jack Kirby's boundless imagination let
loose onto paper."
An attempt at creating new formats for comics
produced the one-shot black-and-white magazines
Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob in
1971.
Kirby later produced other DC features such
as OMAC, Kamandi, The Demon, "The Losers",
and Kobra and, together with former partner
Joe Simon for one last time, a new incarnation
of the Sandman. Kirby produced three issues
of the 1st Issue Special anthology series
and created Atlas The Great, a new Manhunter,
and the Dingbats of Danger Street.
Kirby's production assistant of the time,
Mark Evanier, recounted that DC's policies
of the era were not in synch with Kirby's
creative impulses, and that he was often forced
to work on characters and projects that he
did not want to work on.
Return to Marvel
At the comic book convention Marvelcon '75,
in spring 1975, Stan Lee used a Fantastic
Four panel discussion to announce that Kirby
was returning to Marvel after having left
in 1970 to work for DC Comics. Lee wrote in
his monthly column, "Stan Lee's Soapbox",
that, "I mentioned that I had a special announcement
to make. As I started telling about Jack's
return, to a totally incredulous audience,
everyone's head started to snap around as
Kirby himself came waltzin' down the aisle
to join us on the rostrum! You can imagine
how it felt clownin' around with the co-creator
of most of Marvel's greatest strips once more."
Back at Marvel, Kirby both wrote and drew
the monthly Captain America series as well
as the Captain America's Bicentennial Battles
one-shot in the oversized treasury format.
He created the series The Eternals, which
featured a race of inscrutable alien giants,
the Celestials, whose behind-the-scenes intervention
in primordial humanity would eventually become
a core element of Marvel Universe continuity.
He produced an adaptation and expansion of
the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as
an abortive attempt to do the same for the
classic television series, The Prisoner. He
wrote and drew Black Panther and drew numerous
covers across the line.
Kirby's other Marvel creations in this period
include Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur. Kirby's
final collaboration with Stan Lee, The Silver
Surfer: The Ultimate Cosmic Experience was
published in 1978 as part of the Marvel Fireside
Books series and is considered to be Marvel's
first graphic novel.
Film and animation
Still dissatisfied with Marvel's treatment
of him, and with an offer of employment from
Hanna-Barbera, Kirby left Marvel to work in
animation. In that field, he did designs for
Turbo Teen, Thundarr the Barbarian and other
animated television series. He worked on The
New Fantastic Four animated series, reuniting
him with scriptwriter Stan Lee. He illustrated
an adaptation of the Walt Disney movie The
Black Hole for Walt Disney’s Treasury of
Classic Tales syndicated comic strip in 1979-80.
In 1979, Kirby drew concept art for film producer
Barry Geller's script treatment adapting Roger
Zelazny's science fiction novel, Lord of Light,
for which Geller had purchased the rights.
In collaboration, Geller commissioned Kirby
to draw set designs that would be used as
architectural renderings for a Colorado theme
park to be called Science Fiction Land; Geller
announced his plans at a November press conference
attended by Kirby, former NFL American football
star Rosey Grier, writer Ray Bradbury, and
others. While the film did not come to fruition,
Kirby's drawings were used for the CIA's "Canadian
caper", in which some members of the U.S.
embassy in Tehran, Iran, who had avoided capture
in the Iran hostage crisis, were able to escape
the country posing as members of a movie location-scouting
crew.
Final years and death
In the early 1980s, Pacific Comics, a new,
non-newsstand comic book publisher, made a
then-groundbreaking deal with Kirby to publish
a creator-owned series, Captain Victory and
the Galactic Rangers, and the six-issue miniseries
Silver Star, which was collected in hardcover
format in 2007. This, together with similar
actions by other independent comics publishers
as Eclipse Comics, helped establish a precedent
to end the monopoly of the work for hire system,
wherein comics creators, even freelancers,
had owned no rights to characters they created.
Though estranged from Marvel, Kirby continued
to do periodic work for DC Comics during the
1980s, including a brief revival of his "Fourth
World" saga in the 1984 and 1985 Super Powers
miniseries and the 1985 graphic novel The
Hunger Dogs. DC executives Jenette Kahn and
Paul Levitz had Kirby re-design the Fourth
World characters for the Super Powers toyline
as a way of entitling him to royalties for
several of his DC creations. In 1987, under
pressure from comics creators and the fan
community, Marvel finally returned approximately
1,900 or 2,100 pages of the estimated 10,000
to 13,000 Kirby drew for the company.
Kirby retained ownership of characters used
by Topps Comics beginning in 1993, for a set
of series in what the company dubbed "The
Kirbyverse". These titles were derived mainly
from designs and concepts that Kirby had kept
in his files, some intended initially for
the by-then-defunct Pacific Comics, and then
licensed to Topps for what would become the
"Jack Kirby's Secret City Saga" mythos. Marvel
posthumously published a "lost" Kirby/Lee
Fantastic Four story, Fantastic Four: The
Lost Adventure, with unused pages Kirby had
originally drawn for a story that was partially
published in Fantastic Four #108.
On February 6, 1994, Kirby died at age 76
of heart failure in his Thousand Oaks, California
home. He was buried at the Pierce Brothers
Valley Oaks Memorial Park, Westlake Village,
California.
Kirby's estate
Lisa Kirby announced in early 2006 that she
and co-writer Steve Robertson, with artist
Mike Thibodeaux, planned to publish via the
Marvel Comics Icon imprint a six-issue limited
series, Jack Kirby’s Galactic Bounty Hunters,
featuring characters and concepts created
by her father for Captain Victory. The series,
scripted by Lisa Kirby, Robertson, Thibodeaux,
and Richard French, with pencil art by Jack
Kirby and Thibodeaux, and inking by Scott
Hanna and Karl Kesel primarily, ran an initial
five issues and then a later final issue.
On September 16, 2009, the Kirby estate also
served notices of termination to Walt Disney
Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures,
Paramount Pictures, and Sony Pictures to attempt
to regain control of various Silver Age Marvel
characters. Marvel is seeking to invalidate
these claims. In mid-March 2010 Kirby's estate
"sued Marvel to terminate copyrights and gain
profits from [Kirby's] comic creations." In
July 2011, the United States District Court
for the Southern District of New York issued
a summary judgment in favor of Marvel, which
was affirmed in August 2013 by the United
States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The Kirby estate filed a petition on March
21, 2014 for a review of the case by the US
Supreme Court, but a settlement was reached
on September 26, 2014 and said petition was
requested to be dismissed by the family.
In July 2010, Dynamite Entertainment announced
that in 2011, it would publish Kirby: Genesis,
an eight-issue miniseries by writer Kurt Busiek
and artists Jack Herbert and Alex Ross, featuring
Kirby-owned characters previously published
by Pacific Comics and Topps Comics.
Legacy
The New York Times, in a Sunday op-ed piece
written more than a decade after his death,
said of Kirby:
He created a new grammar of storytelling and
a cinematic style of motion. Once-wooden characters
cascaded from one frame to another—or even
from page to page—threatening to fall right
out of the book into the reader's lap. The
force of punches thrown was visibly and explosively
evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed
with tension and energy in a way that makes
movie versions of the same characters seem
static by comparison.
Michael Chabon, in his afterword to his Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier & Clay, a fictional account of
two early comics pioneers, wrote, "I want
to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this
and everything else I've ever written to the
work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics."
Director James Cameron said Kirby inspired
the look of his film Aliens, calling it "not
intentional in the sense I sat down and looked
at all my favorite comics and studied them
for this film, but, yeah, Kirby's work was
definitely in my subconscious programming.
The guy was a visionary. Absolutely. And he
could draw machines like nobody's business.
He was sort of like A. E. van Vogt and some
of these other science-fiction writers who
are able to create worlds that — even though
we live in a science-fictionary world today —
are still so far beyond what we're experiencing."
Several Kirby images are among those on the
"Marvel Super Heroes" set of commemorative
stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service on
July 27, 2007. Ten of the stamps are portraits
of individual Marvel characters and the other
10 stamps depict individual Marvel Comic book
covers. According to the credits printed on
the back of the pane, Kirby's artwork is featured
on: Captain America, The Thing, Silver Surfer,
The Amazing Spider-Man #1, The Incredible
Hulk #1, Captain America #100, The X-Men #1,
and The Fantastic Four #3.
In 2002, jazz percussionist Gregg Bendian
released a seven-track CD, Requiem for Jack
Kirby, inspired by Kirby's art and storytelling.
Titles of the instrumental cuts include "Kirby's
Fourth World", "New Gods", "The Mother Box",
"Teaneck in the Marvel Age" and "Air Above
Zenn-La".
Various comic-book and cartoon creators have
done homages to Kirby. Examples include the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage Comics
series. The episode of Superman: The Animated
Series entitled "Apokolips...Now!, Part 2"
was dedicated to his memory.
As of July 2012, Kirby's drawing table and
small taboret table reside in the den of his
son, Neal Kirby, who hopes that they will
inspire Kirby's great-grandchildren.
As of September 2012, Hollywood films based
on characters Kirby co-created have collectively
earned nearly $3.1 billion. Kirby himself
is a character portrayed by Luis Yagüe in
the 2009 Spanish short film The King & the
Worst, which is inspired by Kirby's service
in World War II. He is portrayed by Michael
Parks in a brief appearance in the fact-based
drama Argo, about the Canadian Caper.
Awards and honors
Jack Kirby received a great deal of recognition
over the course of his career, including the
1967 Alley Award for Best Pencil Artist. The
following year he was runner-up behind Jim
Steranko. His other Alley Awards were:
1963: Favorite Short Story - "The Human Torch
Meets Captain America", by Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby, Strange Tales #114
1964:Best Novel - "Captain America Joins the
Avengers", by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, from
The Avengers #4
Best New Strip or Book - "Captain America",
by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in Tales of Suspense
1965: Best Short Story - "The Origin of the
Red Skull", by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Tales
of Suspense #66
1966: Best Professional Work, Regular Short
Feature - "Tales of Asgard" by Stan Lee and
Jack Kirby, in Thor
1967: Best Professional Work, Regular Short
Feature - "Tales of Asgard" and "Tales of
the Inhumans", both by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,
in Thor
1968:Best Professional Work, Best Regular
Short Feature - "Tales of the Inhumans", by
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in Thor
Best Professional Work, Hall of Fame - Fantastic
Four, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; Nick Fury,
Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., by Jim Steranko
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. He
was inducted into the Shazam Awards Hall of
Fame in 1975. In 1987 he was an inaugural
inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall
of Fame. He received the 1993 Bob Clampett
Humanitarian Award at that year's Eisner Awards.
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, and the Eisner Award for Best Archival
Collection/Project.
The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall
of Fame were named in his honor.
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, New York, from September 16,
2006 to January 28, 2007.
Bibliography
References
External links
The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center
Jack Kirby at the Comic Book DB
Jack Kirby at the Internet Movie Database
Jack Kirby at Mike's Amazing World of Comics
Evanier, Mark. "The Jack F.A.Q.". News From
ME. Archived from the original on July 2,
2014. 
Mitchell, Elvis. "Jack Kirby Heroes Thrive
in Comic Books and Film". The New York Times.
Archived from the original on June 16, 2013. 
Christiansen, Jeff. "Creations of Jack Kirby".
Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
Archived from the original on November 11,
2013. 
Further reading
Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. Abrams.
ISBN 081099447X. 
Wyman, Ray. The Art of Jack Kirby. Blue Rose
Press, Inc. ISBN 0-9634467-1-1. 
