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This year marks the centenary of two world-changing events: the Russian Revolution and the birth of comic-book artist Jack Kirby. But while Soviet communism has all but vanished from the planet 100 years after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, Kirby's influence still permeates pop culture. He helped create the pantheon of superheroes — Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men — who continue to fill our comic books and soar across our screens. Marvel Comics maestro Stan Lee may have given the heroes voice and humor, but it was Kirby who made them move and fight and live; even now, CGI can barely capture the fury of his battles and the splendor of his dreamscapes.
"Jack Kirby is comics," says Mitch Gerads, who's currently illustrating a DC Comics reboot of Kirby's Mister Miracle. "Everything we love about comics, from the line art to the writing, you can't have it without Jack Kirby."
Tom King, who's writing the series, adds: "Jack Kirby has that utterly American story — child of immigrants, born with nothing, went overseas to fight in a war, and then came back and invented, and then reinvented, a genre. He's the Louis Armstrong of American comics."
Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg, spent his New York City childhood in crowded tenements, and he found escape in movies, pulp novels, and science fiction. Soon he was scribbling his own take on fantastic characters and faraway worlds. One of his first comic jobs was at the sweatshop run by Victor Fox, where he met fellow artist Joe Simon.
Their first collaboration, a comic featuring a space hero called Blue Bolt, was where Kurtzberg officially started signing his name as Jack Kirby, which he thought sounded more like a famous artist. At 6-foot-3, Simon's tall, thin frame was quite a contrast with the much shorter Kirby's. In fact, a photograph of the two inspired Michael Chabon's prize-winning novel about the golden age of comics, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Just as the fictional Kavalier and Clay hit the creative jackpot with their superhero the Escapist, Simon and Kirby dreamed up a superhero who endures to this day: Captain America, who made his debut delivering a nasty right hook to Adolf Hitler on the comic's cover.
Not long after Captain America's debut, Kirby was drafted to fight overseas in World War II; he would later mine his frontline combat experience for the epic battles in his comics. As renowned comic artist Geof Darrow tells EW, explosive action is one of the major hallmarks of a Kirby comic, which makes sense — from his tenement childhood to the battlefields of Europe, Kirby saw a lot of fighting firsthand.
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