Eventually the partnership broke up and Joe Simon left comics to work in advertising. But there were money troubles, and this strained the relationship between the old friends. Simon and Kirby started their own comic company, Mainline, which published four titles (tellingly, none of them were superhero comics). Simon and Kirby created Captain 3D to cash in on the 3D fad, and when Atlas (the new name for Timely) resurrected Captain America the duo fought back with The Fighting American, a patriotic hero whose politics reflected Kirby’s own left wing beliefs (to the point that the Fighting American satirized Joe McCarthy and his House UnAmerican Activities hearings). Jack was never a big fan of horror stuff, and so he rarely worked on the types of comics that we most associate with the 50s, but he did get into some very 1950s territory. Together they invented the romance comic, which would sweep the medium as superheroes mostly faded away. Jack Kirby comes home to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in 1945.Īfter the war Jack got back together with Joe Simon and they continued revolutionizing comic books. Luckily they were saved, and Jack went back to the States with the Combat Infantryman Badge and a bronze battle star. With frostbite on his legs, Kirby was shipped back to England, expecting to have his legs amputated. Jack fought in the Battle of the Bulge, but it wasn’t the Nazis that took him down, it was the cruel winter. When his commanding officer discovered that Jack had artistic talent he made him a scout, sending him forward to German-occupied town to sketch out maps. In 1944 Jack ended up overseas, landing on Omaha Beach a few months after D-Day. In 1942 Kirby legally changed his name from Kurtzberg and married Roz, who would be the love of his life. National had them squirrel away a whole year’s worth of comics for the very likely event that they get drafted. Captain America had been Simon and Kirby’s very political stand on the European situation (they actually received hate mail for having Cap punch Hitler on the cover of issue one), and they knew they were going to get sucked into the destruction overseas eventually. While at National they revamped existing characters like Sandman and Manhunter and also staked their own territory with the boys own adventure titles Boy Commandos and The Newsboy Legion the Legion especially seemed plucked right from Kirby’s own life on the Lower East Side, hanging out at the Boys Brotherhood Republic. These two companies, by the way, would one day be known respectively as Marvel and DC. What happened next would prove prophetic for the rest of Kirby’s career: the team felt mistreated by Timely, and so they left the company after Captain America Comics #10, going to work for rival publisher National. And so was born Jack Kirby’s famous speed the artist would be known for penciling as many as 15 pages in a week. Simon, who hatched the character, was going to bring in more artists to help Kirby, but the young artist insisted he could handle the workload. The comic was soon outselling Time Magazine. In many ways the character was a riff on a rival company MLJ’s The Shield (so much so that Cap’s badge-shaped shield (which looked like The Shield’s chest plate) was changed to round in issue 2 of Captain America Comics after legal rumblings from MLJ), but Captain America grasped the imagination of the country in a totally different way. Jack had been working under numerous pen names, but he decided to stick with Jack Kirby, supposedly because it reminded him of Jimmy Cagney.Īt Timely Simon and Kirby created one of the great icons of comic books: Captain America. Simon knew that Jack’s work was remarkable, and together they started working at Timely Comics. In his teens he began doing it professionally for a number of magazines and comic strips and advice comics (they existed back in the day) before meeting and collaborating with fellow cartoonist Joe Simon. He was the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants and lived in poverty art was his escape. Rightfully called “The King of Comics,” Kirby was a singular visionary whose impact on the pop culture continues to be felt almost two decades after his passing.īorn Jacob Kurtzberg on New York’s Lower East Side (probably not far from Ben Grimm’s Yancy Street), Jack began drawing at an early age. Jack Kirby did not invent the superhero, but he perfected it.
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