Jack Kirby | The Avengers

My guest this week is The Real Michael Lee, a musician, graphic designer, illustrator and comic enthusiast (find him and all his social media at bit.ly/heartrml) . We had a great talk about Jack Kirby, the legendary comic book artist who made contributions to both Marvel and DC among others. Kirby was responsible for the development of several notable characters including The Fantastic Four, Thor, Captain America, Black Panther, and for this episode, we focused on his illustration of The Avengers.

At age 14, Jack Kirby enrolled in Pratt. He later said he wasn’t the kind of student Pratt was interested in. They wanted people to work on their projects forever. He didn’t want to work on anything forever - he wanted to get things done. Throughout his career, Kirby was noted to be very fast in his work. He would put out about 5 pages a day.

Kirby basically was all over the scene in the golden age of comics. Companies were springing up and going under or morphing into other companies and it seems like he basically worked with, for, or helped create all of them. Jack Kirby experimented with things like romance comics for a more mature audience and I think that wasn’t really breaking any rules because the rules hadn’t even been established yet. His work showed generations of artists how to create compelling visualizations of epic yet relatable heroes.

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast.

Connect with me:

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Tiktok

Support the show:

Merch from TeePublic | Buy me a coffee

As always you can find images of the work being discussed at www.WhoARTedPodcast.com and of course, please leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. You might hear it read out on the show.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices