Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby, or “The King” as comic nerds like to call him, basically helped shape the comic book universe as we know it. Born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917, right in the thick of New York’s Lower East Side, the guy was a scrappy, self-taught artist. His parents were Austrian-Jewish immigrants, and his dad worked in a garment factory—classic New York immigrant story, right? Young Jack got obsessed with drawing early, basically glued to the comics page, soaking up inspiration from legends like Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and Alex Raymond. The dude even picked his pen name maybe because of Rollin Kirby, some big-shot cartoonist back in the day. Kirby gave art school a shot, enrolling at Pratt Institute when he was just 14, but honestly? He bailed pretty fast. The school wanted slow, perfect pieces, but Jack was all about cranking out tons of wild, energetic art. He jumped into pro cartooning by 1936, working for Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate, then dipped his toe into animation at Fleischer Studios, but hated the assembly-line vibe and noped out. The comics world was exploding in the late ‘30s, so Kirby landed at Eisner and Iger Studio, where he drew all kinds of stuff—sci-fi, westerns, you name it—under a bunch of fake names. By 1940, he was drawing superhero stories for Fox Features Syndicate (though some ghost credit nonsense meant he didn’t always get his name on it). Then he met Joe Simon—the start of a legendary tag team. Together, they cooked up Captain America in 1941, and the rest is basically comic book history.