Jack Kirby

Born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, in New York City, Jack Kirby taught himself to draw by tracing newspaper comic strips and editorial cartoons before breaking into the nascent comics industry during the 1930s, working under several pen names before settling on the one that would become synonymous with American superhero comics. He died on February 6, 1994.

His early partnership with writer-editor Joe Simon proved enormously generative. The two created Captain America for Timely Comics in 1940, pioneered the romance comics genre at Crestwood Publications, and even launched their own short-lived imprint, Mainline Publications. After Kirby's service in the European Theater during World War II, he worked across multiple publishers before landing at what would become Marvel Comics, where his output in the 1960s was staggering — co-creating the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, Black Panther, Ant-Man, and the Silver Surfer, among others.

Frustrated by disputes over authorship credit and creators' rights, Kirby moved to DC Comics in 1970, where he developed his ambitious Fourth World saga and its enduring New Gods mythology. Though those titles were canceled prematurely, the characters have remained fixtures of the DC Universe.

Kirby earned widespread recognition late in life, becoming one of the three inaugural inductees into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1987, and was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2017.