Jack Kirby was an American comic book artist, writer and editor, 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 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 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 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 under writer-editor Stan Lee, Kirby created many of the company's major characters, including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Hulk. The Lee–Kirby 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", 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 with Lee for their co-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.
Wikipedia
“I never do fairy tale people, I do people just as they are.”
“1993: Jack Kirby: The Hardest Working Man in Comics by Steve Pastis” https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/category/interview/, Happening Magazine, (1993) by Steve Pastin; as quoted by Rand Hoppe, The Kirby Effect The Journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, (28 April 2018).
1993
“I feel that story, first. I know those people, first. When I put them down they've already lived.”
an archival video clip included in With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, a 2010 documentary, beginning at 17:50
Source: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel’s grand Hollywood adventure, and his family’s quest http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/jack-kirby-the-forgotten-hero-in-marvels-grand-hollywood-adventure/, Los Angeles Times, (September 25, 2009).
Mark Evanier, "Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel's grand Hollywood adventure, and his family's quest" http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/jack-kirby-the-forgotten-hero-in-marvels-grand-hollywood-adventure/, Los Angeles Times, (September 25, 2009).
About
TCJ Archive, Jack Kirby Interview http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal
Source: Guillermo del Toro, Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel’s grand Hollywood adventure, and his family’s quest http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/jack-kirby-the-forgotten-hero-in-marvels-grand-hollywood-adventure/, The Los Angeles Times, (September 25, 2009).
TCJ Archive, "Jack Kirby Interview" http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal, (February 1990, posted May 23, 2011).
"Jack Kirby Interview" http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/6/, Gary Groth, The Comics Journal, #134, (February 1990, posted May 23, 2011).
Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”.
Context: page 4 http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/4/ 1990, Gary Groth interview
Source: "'I've Never Done Anything Halfheartedly'". The Comics Journal. Seattle, Washington: Fantagraphics Books (134). February 1990. Reprinted in George, Milo, ed. (2002). The Comics Journal Library, Volume One: Jack Kirby. Seattle, Washington: Fantagraphics Books. p. 22.
1990, Gary Groth interview
Randolph Hoppe, as qtd in Arturo Garcia, "Would Captain America’s Co-Creator Punch Nazis?" https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/24/captain-americas-co-creator-punch-nazis/, Snopes, (24 January 2017).
About
Source: “1993: Jack Kirby: The Hardest Working Man in Comics by Steve Pastis” https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/category/interview/, Happening Magazine, (1993) by Steve Pastin; as quoted by Rand Hoppe, The Kirby Effect The Journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, (28 April 2018).
“His real dream was to make movies.”
Rosalind Kirby, "Jack Kirby Interview" http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal, (May 23, 2011).
About
1990, Gary Groth interview
Source: Stan Lee, “1993: Jack Kirby: The Hardest Working Man in Comics by Steve Pastis” https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/category/interview/, Happening Magazine, (1993) by Steve Pastin; as quoted by Rand Hoppe, The Kirby Effect The Journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, (28 April 2018).
"Jack Kirby Interview" http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/6/, Gary Groth, The Comics Journal, #134, (February 1990, posted May 23, 2011).
TCJ Archive, "Jack Kirby Interview" http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal, (February 1990, posted May 23, 2011).
that was my objective. I knew the [reader] was never happy all the time. You take the Thing, he’d knock out 50 guys at a time and win — then maybe he’d sit down and kind of reflect on it: “Maybe I hurt somebody or maybe we could have done it some other way” like a human being would think, not like a monster. In other books the guy would knock out the gangs and that would be the end of it. You would see the guys in jail, and that’s it. Or it would say, “Wait until next week.”
Source: 1990, Gary Groth interview
Source: page 5 http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/ 1990, Gary Groth interview
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