There are really only two men who I feel deserve the nickname "The King". One is Elvis Presley. The other is Jack Kirby.
Jack Kirby is famous thanks to his amazing contributions to the world of comic books. Kirby helped create Captain America, The Fantasic Four, The Hulk, The X-Men, The Silver Surfer, Dr Doom, Galactus and the Black Panther. He created, all on his own, The New Gods, Mr Miracle and Big Barda, The Forever People, Kamandi, Omac, The Demon and Darkseid.
I honestly think that without him, the rich history and culture of the comic book world would have never survived to become the huge blockbuster industry it is today. For all of the credit Stan Lee gets for creating a juggernaut with Marvel Comics, he couldn't have done it at all without Kirby.
Endless amounts of books, essays and accounts of Kirbby's life have been written. I'm really not going tobe able to add much more than the tremedous accounts written about him. All I want to do here is pay tribute to a great talent that should be remembered and respected. I'll start off with a (semi) brief history of his comic career, and then get into the stuff I really enjoyed the most from him.
Jack Kirby was born in 1917 with the name Jacob Kurtzberg and raised in The Bowery in New York. He grew up in poverty and his ticket out of the slums was his drawing ability. In 1935 he got a job with Max Fleischer Studios working on animated cartoons. He did that for about two years and in 1937 he began drawing comic strips and single-panel cartoons for a small newspaper syndicate called The Lincoln News.
At twenty years old Kirby was already outputting a large amount of work and he managed to use some different styles and use different pen names on about a half a dozen different features. Some of those features were reprinted in the comic book market, and Kirby found a new world waiting for him. Some of his work found it';s way to Fox Comics.
At Fox Comics, Kirby met a freelance writer and artist by the name of Joe Simon. The two hit it off well and started producing work together. Simon started out doing the layouts of their work together with Kirby doing the finishing, but Kirby was so much faster and seemed to understand the way comic books worked a little more, and down the line he started doing the layouts with Simon finishing.
The two worked on a number of things before hitting it big with Captain Amercia, a character they created for Timely (ie Marvel Comics) Comics in 1941.
Captian Amercia has a HUGE hit and helped Kirby and Simon to get work over at DC Comics creating The Boy Commandos.
Not long after that, he was drafted into World War II and spent the war as a soldier.
Coming in Part Two: Jack's work following the war, and the creation of some characters that went beyond anything Jack could every have imagined.
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