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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