Jack Kirby

After serving in the European Theatre 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, Kirby cocreated many of the company's major characters, including Ant-Man, the Avengers, the Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, Thor, and the X-Men, among many others. Kirby's 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 comic titles. While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were cancelled, 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 and 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 for his 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 honour, and he is known as "The King" among comics fans for his many influential contributions to the medium.

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