How is it that the work of Jack Kirby, which contains some of the most colorful characters and influential mythology of the last century, still manages to feel so personal? Comic books are now known at least as much as source material for exciting movies as they are for being currently published graphic stories. Kirby’s work has been adapted into roughly a dozen of the most successful feature films of recent years, with more on the way all the time.

Jack Kirby may primarily be known as a great and influential comic book creator, but above all else, he was a storyteller. He understood the powerful impact that stories, any stories, could have. His mother and other elders told stories that enraptured him as a boy. The stories in the newspaper comics and in the movie theaters did the same.

Jack drew as a child, he drew as a teen, he drew as a young man, and he drew well into his old age. Kirby learned that he, his pencil, and a piece of paper could engage the mind and emotion of the audience as much as his own mind had been engaged. He learned that science fiction could serve the same function in the present as mythology had in the past. He knew, from his time spent with his gang of buddies in New York City’s toughest ghetto, the Lower East Side, his fellow soldiers on the battlefields of Europe during World War Two, and the life-long love he shared with his wife Roz, how we all used drama and myth to help cope with the best and the worst of times.

Early on, Kirby’s drawings became more than just lines on a page, they became the raw material for stories. Jack Kirby was there at the beginning of the comic book as it is known in America.