Kirby, Jack

Jack Kirby, original name Jacob Kurtzberg, (born August 28, 1917, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 6, 1994, Thousand Oaks, California), American comic book artist who helped create hundreds of original characters, including Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.

Kirby left high school at age 16 and worked in Max Fleischer’s animation studio on Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons before teaming up with fellow artist Joe Simon in 1941. Working for Timely (later Marvel) Comics, the pair created Captain America, a star-spangled super-soldier who quickly became the publisher’s most popular character. Kirby and Simon collaborated on a number of titles over the following years, exploring the crime, horror, and humour genres, and they created the first romance comic in 1947. Kirby and Simon’s professional relationship was strained by the challenges of working in an increasingly competitive and uncertain market, and by 1956 the team had drifted apart. Kirby responded by turning to newspaper comic strips, and his Sky Masters of the Space Force was a moderate success.

By the late 1950s Kirby had found steady work with National (later DC) and, increasingly, with Marvel (then known as Atlas Comics). He started on western and monster titles at Marvel, and Kirby’s creatures—behemoths with names like Goom, Sporr, and Fin Fang Foom—boosted sales for the struggling publisher. In 1961 Marvel editor Stan Lee outlined the story of an ill-fated trip into space and its super-heroic consequences. Using the “Marvel method,” which stressed collaboration between writer and artist, Lee and Kirby turned that premise into The Fantastic Four. Kirby’s artistic skills gave the book a visual punch, and, with his experience with romance comics and Lee’s knack for dialogue, they captured the soap-opera feel of life in a superpowered family. Whereas previous superheroes tended toward inhuman perfection, Kirby and Lee found success with everyman characters whose failures and flaws resonated with readers.

Marvel’s next new title, The Incredible Hulk, debuted in 1962 as Kirby and Lee’s monstrous take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story. The “Marvel Universe” was soon filled with Kirby creations, such as the X-Men, Silver Surfer, the planet-devouring Galactus, and a revived Captain America.

In 1970 Kirby left Marvel over creative differences with Lee and joined rival DC. The following year he launched a trio of comics—New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People—which he envisioned as finite series of interlocked stories that would eventually be collected in a single volume. Though these books were canceled long before the conclusion of the planned epic saga, Kirby’s “Fourth World” characters, most notably the planetary despot Darkseid, became integral parts of the DC mythos. Kirby returned to Marvel in 1975, but he left again three years later after stints on Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, and The Eternals (a book that bore more than a passing resemblance to New Gods). He worked as a freelance animator during the 1980s and retired in 1987.

Throughout his half-century career, Kirby stretched the boundaries of comic storytelling, and his expansive body of work ultimately earned him the nickname “the King of Comics.” Although his influence within the industry was unquestioned, the legal rights to the characters that he had helped to create remained a matter of debate. In 2009, several weeks after the Disney Company announced that it would acquire Marvel for $4 billion, Kirby’s heirs issued dozens of copyright termination notices to Marvel, Disney, and an assortment of Hollywood studios. Marvel countersued, and courts twice found in favour of Marvel, ruling that Kirby’s work had been “for hire,” thus granting him no claim to the relevant copyrights. In September 2014, just days before the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to discuss the case in conference, the litigants reached an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum. The following month Kirby’s name began appearing on the credits page of a number of Marvel titles, in recognition of his role as a cocreator of the featured characters.