Lower East Side kid who dynamited the Marvel universe
Jacob Kurtzberg, 28 August 1917 to 6 February 1994, became Jack Kirby, comics' prolific King. From Essex Street tenements to Captain America with Joe Simon and cosmic Fourth World sagas at DC, he drew power with machinery, myth, and punch.
Jacob Kurtzberg was born in 1917 at 147 Essex Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants; his father worked in a garment factory. Largely self-taught, he learned by tracing newspaper strips and editorial cartoons and admired Milton Caniff and Hal Foster. At fourteen he enrolled at the Pratt Institute and quit within a week, explaining that the school wanted students who would labour over a piece forever, while he wanted to finish things.
He worked on strips and advice panels at the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate from 1936 under the name Jack Curtiss, filled in frames on Popeye cartoons at Fleischer Studios, and then wrote and drew for the packager Eisner and Iger under a string of aliases. He finally settled on Jack Kirby because it reminded him of James Cagney, and bristled at suggestions he was hiding his Jewish roots. At Fox Feature Syndicate, earning $15 a week, he met the editor Joe Simon, beginning one of comics' great partnerships.
At Martin Goodman's Timely Comics the pair created Captain America in late 1940. Believing Goodman was short-changing them on profits, they moved to National, the future DC, for a combined $500 a week against their previous $75 and $85, revamping the Sandman and launching the Boy Commandos in 1942. Drafted on 7 June 1943, Kirby served with the 11th Infantry Regiment and came ashore at Omaha Beach on 23 August 1944.
After the war Simon and Kirby freelanced for Harvey, Hillman and Crestwood, and their Young Romance of 1947, modelled on the confession magazine True Story, launched the romance comic genre. In the 1960s at Marvel he co-created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the Avengers, Iron Man, the Black Panther and the Silver Surfer; his later Fourth World saga at DC flopped commercially yet its New Gods endured. Married to Rosalind Goldstein from 1942, he died of heart failure in 1994 at 76.
Source: Jack Kirby
