I grew up on Suffolk Street in New York's Lower East Side, attending elementary school at P.S. 20. My father, a garment-factory worker, was a Conservative Jew, and I attended Hebrew school. My one sibling, a brother five years younger, predeceased me. After a rough-and-tumble childhood with much fighting among the kind of kid gangs I would render more heroically in my future comics, I enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, at what I said was age 14, 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.
Essentially self-taught, I cited among my influences the comic strip artists Alex Raymond and Milt Caniff.
Per my own sometimes-unreliable memory, I 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 (under the pseudonym "JackCurtiss"). I remained until the firm went out of business in 1938, then worked for the movie animation company Fleischer Studios as an "in-betweener" (an artist who fills in the action between major-movement frames,) on Popeye cartoons. I went from Lincoln to Fleischer, from Fleischer I had to get out in a hurry because I couldn't take that kind of thing, it was a factory in a sense, like my father's factory. They were manufacturing pictures.
Around this time, I began to see the first comic books appear. The first American comic books were reprints of newspaper comic strips; soon, these tabloid-size, 10-inch by 15-inch "comic books" began to include original material in comic-strip form. I began writing and drawing such material for the comic book packager Eisner & Iger, one of a handful of firms creating comics on demand for publishers. Through that company, I did what I remembers as my first comic book work, for Wild Boy Magazine.3 This was followed by such strips as the science fiction adventure The Diary of Dr. Hayward (under the pseudonym "Curt Davis"), the modern-West crimefighter strip Wilton of the West (as "Fred Sande"), the swashbuckler strip "The Count of Monte Cristo" (again as "JackCurtiss"), and the humor strips Abdul Jones (as "Ted Grey)" and Socko the Seadog (as "Teddy"), all variously for Jumbo Comics and other Eisner-Iger clients.
I moved on to comic book publisher and newspaper syndicator Fox Feature Syndicate, earning a then quite-reasonable $15 a week salary. I began exploring superhero narrative with the comic strip The Blue Beetle, starring a character created by Chuck Cuidera in Mystery Men Comics ..1 under the pseudonym "Charles Nicholas", which I retained.
During this time, I met and began collaborating with cartoonist and Fox editor Joe Simon, who in addition to his staff work continued to freelance. Speaking at a 1998 Comic-Con International panel in San Diego, Simon recounted our fateful meeting:
"I had a suit and I thought that was really nice. I'd never seen a comic book artist with a suit before. The reason I had a suit was that my father was a tailor. Jack's father was a tailor too, but he made pants! Anyway, I was doing freelance work and I had a little office in New York about ten blocks from DC's and Fox [Feature Syndicate]'s offices, and Jack was working on Blue Bolt for Funnies, Inc. So, of course, 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.and remained a team across the next two decades. "
Collectors have shown what is purported to be original art for an unpublished, five-page Simon & Kirby collaboration titled "Daring Disc", which may predate the duo's Blue Bolt. Autobiographical material by and interviews with Simon and I do not appear to mention this story.
After leaving Fox and landing at pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman's Timely Comics (the future Marvel), the new Simon& Kirby team created the seminal patriotic hero Captain America in late 1940. My dynamic perspectives, groundbreaking use of centerspreads, cinematic techniques and exaggerated sense of action made the title an immediate hit and rewrote the rules for comic book art. Captain America Comics is credited with comics' first full-page panel.
Captain America became the first and largest of many hit characters the duo would produce. The Simon & Kirby name soon became synonymous with exciting superhero comics, and the two became industry stars whose readers followed them from title to title. A financial dispute with Goodman led to their decamping to National Publications, the primary precursor of DC Comics, after ten issues of Captain America. Given a lucrative contract at their new home, Joe and I revamped The Sandman in Adventure Comics, and scored their next hits with the "kid gang" teams the Boy Commandos and the Newsboy Legion, and the superhero Manhunter.
I married Rosalind "Roz" Goldstein ..September 25, 1922–December 22.., 1998 on May 23, 1942. That same year I changed his name legally from Jacob Kurtzberg to Jack Kirby. We were living in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, when Kirby was drafted into the U.S. Army in the late autumn of 1943. Serving with the Third Army combat infantry, he landed in Normandy, on Omaha Beach, 10 days after D-Day. As superhero comics waned in popularity after the end of World War II, my partner and I began producing a variety of other genre stories. We are credited with the creation of the first romance title, Young Romance Comics at Crestwood Publications, now renamed Prize Comics. In addition, we produced crime, horror, western and humor comics.
The Kirby & Simon partnership ended amicably in 1954 with the comic-book industry beset by self-imposed censorship and negative publicity and the failure of our own Mainline Publications. I continued to create comics, reinventing Green Arrow in DC's Adventure Comics and creating the well-received feature about a group of death-defying adventurers, the Challengers of the Unknown.
I returned to Marvel during its 1950s iteration as Atlas Comics. There I drew a series of imaginative monster, horror and science fiction stories for its many anthology series, such as Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense. My bizarre designs of powerful, unearthly creatures proved a hit with readers. Then, with Marvel editor Stan Lee, I began working on superhero comics again, beginning with The Fantastic Four ..1 in Nov. 1961. The landmark series became a hit that revolutionized the industry with its true-to-life naturalism and, eventually, a cosmic purview informed by my seemingly boundless imagination — one coincidentally well-matched with the consciousness-expanding youth culture of the 1960s.
Over the next several years, I served Marvel as de facto art director, co-creating/designing many of the Marvel characters and teaching new artists how to draw in the "Marvel style". When, in the early seventies, I left Marvel to work for Carmine Infantino at Marvel rival DC Comics, I quipped I was "basically competing against myself". Highlights besides the Fantastic Four include Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the original X-Men, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, Galactus, The Watcher, Magneto, Ego the Living Planet, the Inhumans and their hidden city of Attilan, and the Black Panther — comics' first major Black superhero — and his African nation of Wakanda. Simon & Kirby's Captain America was reincorporated into Marvel continuity.
I continued to expand the medium's boundaries, devising photo-collage covers and interiors, and other experiments. Yet he grew increasingly frustrated by Marvel's refusal to credit me specifically for his story co-plotting and for my character creations and co-creations
After falling out with Lee, I returned to DC in the early 1970s, where I produced a series of titles under the blanket sobriquet The Fourth World. In addition, I also included the minor Superman title, Jimmy Olsen. This choice was because the failing series was between artists and I did not want to cost anyone a job in favor of myself. The interrelated titles I produced for this were New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People. I also produced other DC titles such as OMAC, Kamandi, The Demon, and -together with former partner Joe Simon for one last time- a new incarnation of the Sandman. Several characters from this period have since become fixtures in the DC universe, including the demon Etrigan and his human counterpart Jason BloodScott Free (Mister Miracle), and the cosmic villain Darkseid.
I then returned to Marvel Comics where I both wrote and drew Captain America and created my last major comics concept with the series The Eternals, which featured a race of inscrutable alien giants, the Celestials, whose behind-the-scenes intervention evolved life on Earth. This concept has since become a central tenet of the Marvel universe, and the rationale for the existence of its super-beings. My other Marvel creations in this period include Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man, and an adaptation and expansion of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also wrote and drew The Black Panther and did numerous covers across the line.
I eventually left Marvel to work in animation, where he did designs for Turbo Teen, Thundarr the Barbarian and other animated television series.
In the early 1980s, Pacific Comics, a new, non-newsstand comic book publisher, made a then-groundbreaking deal with me to publish my series Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers: I would retain copyright over my creation and receive royalties on it. This, following similar action by fellow independent Eclipse Comics and a longtime push by artist Neal Adams for industry reform, helped establish a precedent for other professionals and end the monopoly of the "work for hire" system, wherein comics creators, even freelancers, had owned no rights to characters they created. I also retained ownership of characters used by Topps Comics beginning in 1993, for a set of series in what the company dubbed "The Kirbyverse".
References
- The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators The Jack Kirby Chronology details his artistic output, month by month, from 1938 to 1995. The Jack Kirby FAQ (by Mark Evanier) Mark Evanier article about Kirby POV Online Jan. 9, 1998 The Jack Kirby Collector ..10 (Interview with Roz Kirby) "Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby (Vol. 1) . (Marvel Comics, 2004). ISBN 0785115749 Jack Kirby: The TCJ Interviews. Milo George, Ed. (Fantagraphics Books, Inc., 2001). ISBN 1560974346 Ro, Ronin. Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution. (Bloomsbury, 2004). ISBN 1582343454 Comic Book Awards Almanac
External links
- The Jack Kirby Collector Jack Kirby discussion group Fansite profile on Kirby The Pitch April 19, 2001: "Custody Battle: Marvel Comics isn't going to give up Captain America without a fight", By Robert Wilonsky