This year was always going to be a big one for Jack Kirby. Today would have been his 100th birthday, and the month of August has long been earmarked by the comics industry to celebrate one of its most influential creators. As the illustrator of some of the biggest characters in comic history, the tough, tireless and trailblazing visual storyteller laid the foundations for today’s seemingly unquenchable obsession with superheroes. But despite being overshadowed these days by Marvel’s grinning nonagenarian Stan Lee, the stogie-chomping artist known simply as “the King” has retained his status as a legend.

Unexpectedly, Kirby cropped up in the news again this January, when the ethics of punching Nazis – done with such style by his Captain America – became an international debate. The patriotic super-soldier, co-created by Kirby and writer Joe Simon in early 1941, was memorably introduced on his first cover bopping Hitler with a solid right hook, months before the US even joined the second world war. Kirby – born Jacob Kurtzberg to Austrian Jewish immigrant parents in New York – would go on to prove he had the courage of his convictions. Drafted in 1943, he almost lost his legs to frostbite serving as a scout in Europe, before being honourably discharged in 1945. Punching Nazis was A-OK with the King – and 70 years on, critics of the alt-right have found powerful allies in Cap and his Jewish co-creator.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Captain America #1 1941, illustrated by Jack Kirby. Photograph: Marvel

Kirby’s own origin story was similarly two-fisted. The way he told it, growing up poor on New York’s Lower East Side consisted largely of him and his brother Dave battling rival street gangs. But between turf wars, his imagination was sparked by pulp sci-fi magazines and Prince Valiant, and he began to draw. By his early teens, he was a working artist, sketching single panels and strips for a newspaper syndicate, in production-line conditions comparable to the garment factory where his father worked. After various gigs – including a stint at Max Fleischer’s animation studio making Popeye – and various pen names, Kurtzberg finally settled on “Jack Kirby”, and making comics.

Kirby's wife Roz forbade him from driving because he would drift off into reveries at the wheel

In the 1940s and 50s, the US comic industry had a frontier mentality, similar to the cowboy comics Kirby was drawing. Dozens of publishers were furiously chasing fads, creating sensational content that often raised the ire of morality campaigners. The boom-and-bust nature of the business could be exhausting – but Kirby’s versatility and phenomenal work rate kept him going. He was also conscientious: when he and Simon were drafted, they prepared a year’s worth of material for their then-employer National Comics to publish in their absence. But everything Kirby produced was essentially work-for-hire, giving him no control over his art or ideas – a precedent that would haunt him later.

When he gravitated back to publisher Timely, by 1958 renamed Atlas, Kirby had been a working artist for almost three decades, creating romance comics, war comics and monster comics. Three years later, reunited with one Stanley Lieber – who had worked for Atlas as a teenager and was now going by the name Stan Lee – the pair revitalised the ailing publisher by creating a comic about a bickering extended family transformed into superheroes by cosmic rays.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fantastic Four #1, from 1961. Photograph: Marvel

The Fantastic Four was an emphatic hit. Atlas became Marvel, and Kirby’s comics became superhero showcases, introducing a veritable who’s-who of characters on cinema screens today: Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, the collective Avengers, Silver Surfer and the X-Men, not to mention the hundreds of supporting characters who populated their stories. Then – as now – Lee was the grinning ringmaster who sold the mighty Marvel manner, with bluster and a somewhat ingratiating patter. Meanwhile Kirby, who worked 14-hour days, seven days a week in his windowless basement at home in Long Island, cranking out entire issues from outlines or conversations with Lee, was paid a page-rate only.

Despite Lee getting the writer credit, Kirby always insisted that he came up with the ideas and plots. “Whatever it took to sell a book I came up with,” he said in 1990. “Stan Lee has never been editorial minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories.” In a 1968 interview, Lee himself said: “Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I’ll just say to Jack, ‘Let’s let the next villain be Dr. Doom’… or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s so good at plots, I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I.”

Even now, Kirby’s unparalleled creativity powers half of the comic book industry. Vivid characters and dazzling concepts seemed to pour out of Kirby (his wife Roz forbade him from driving because he would drift off into reveries at the wheel). This army of ideas was matched by revolutionary art: where rival comics appeared to be populated by stiff mannequins, Kirby’s chunky characters lunged out of the pages. The punches felt like they landed; the colours thrummed with energy. Soon Kirby was cramming his pages with fantastically detailed technology and representing cosmic forces with energised dots – a trademark flourish nicknamed the “Kirby krackle” – that added even more dynamism to his ambitious page layouts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Black Panther #1, from 1977. Photograph: Marvel

After an astonishingly productive decade at Marvel, Kirby was lured back to their rival DC in 1971 with the promise of more autonomy, and promptly started building his own Fourth World mythology, a cosmic story of New Gods and Forever People that relocated the battle between good and evil to beyond the stars. It was heady stuff – but within five years he was back working for Marvel. “I bounced back and forth like a yo-yo,” he admitted in a 1990 interview. Back at Marvel, he revitalised Black Panther, a character he had created during his initial Fantastic Four run, and worked on a comic adaptation of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that voyaged beyond the movie.

But while he was admired by his peers and revered by the incoming generation of talent, Kirby fell slightly out of fashion by the 1980s. He worked periodically with DC and some small publishers and animation studios, but his relationship with Marvel had soured. In 1984, the studio asked Kirby to sign a new contract confirming that all of his Marvel creations had been work-for-hire and offered to return just 88 pages of his art – some 1% of what he had drawn between 1960 and 1970. Instead, Kirby tried to regain some of the estimated 13,000 pages he had produced for them; after three years of wrangling, Kirby was left with around 2,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Avengers #4, from 1963. Photograph: Marvel

A lawyer would see this as a company protecting its intellectual property. To the comics industry, even today, it seems disrespectful, a dismissal of one of its visionaries. And the finding would haunt Kirby’s family long after his death in 1994. His widow Roz was granted a pension and reportedly vowed to live long to make what she felt the family was owed (she died just two years later). When Marvel was bought by Disney in 2009, in an astronomical $4bn deal, Kirby’s heirs filed a suit against Marvel, Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Sony, to stop any studios interested in making films with characters he’d had a role in creating. In 2014, the Kirbys and Marvel reached a legal agreement that would honour, as it solemnly stated: “Mr Kirby’s significant role in Marvel’s history.” During the legal tussle, the Marvel Cinematic Universe evolved into the biggest film franchise in history; today, it has earned more than $12.5bn.

These days, Marvel is marking Kirby’s centenary by reprinting some of his most striking issues, from Captain America to Black Panther (and selling them for a buck a pop). DC, meanwhile, have recruited artists and writers to create one-off stories based on classic Kirby characters, and is launching a new series based on his nifty escapologist, Mister Miracle. Later in the year, the trippy polychromatic palette of Thor: Ragnarok has a familiar “krackle” to it (director Taika Waititi incorporated Kirby artwork into his designs), and November sees DC’s Justice League do battle with Ciarán Hinds as the diabolical villain Steppenwolf, a whole-cloth Kirby creation. Collectively, it seems a fitting tribute in the year of his centenary, even if Kirby’s legacy still contains a cautionary tale. If the King of comics gave us all this and was left with nothing, what chance do mere mortals have?