In 1982, the late-night talk show host Johnny Carson insulted Jack Kirby in one of the worst possible ways, out of sheer ignorance. As a favor for a small publisher, Kirby had created a comic book called “Battle for a Three Dimensional World.” The artist’s dynamic, eye-popping style was perfect for the format of the book, which came with 3-D glasses reading “Jack Kirby, King of the Comics.” Someone had given Carson the glasses for a comedy routine, sending Carson into an angry riff on national television. Who was this Jack Kirby character, Carson wanted to know, who claimed to be the “king of the comics”? Carson knew every comedian around, and he’d never heard of this Kirby joker. “He’s king of the con men, as far as I’m concerned!” Carson exclaimed.

Jack Kirby, according to his biographer and onetime assistant Mark Evanier, was “deeply, deeply hurt” by Carson’s insults. Evanier wrote to Carson to explain that Kirby was no boastful third-rate stand-up comedian but a legendary comic-book artist, the creator or co-creator of a pantheon of superheroes that included Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Avengers, Nick Fury, Ant Man, Thor, Black Panther, and scores of others. The moniker Jack “King” Kirby was bestowed on him by Kirby’s collaborator (and sometime foe) Stan Lee. Chastened by the letter, Carson offered a gracious on-air apology.

This case of mistaken identity, one of the many large and small humiliations that bedeviled Kirby’s life, is emblematic of the cartoonist’s curious status as an artist who changed the world while living in obscurity. Born 100 years ago today, Kirby was one of the most influential creators of the twentieth century. He’s as central to the genre of the superhero as Walt Disney is to animated cartoons, Agatha Christie is to detective fiction, Alfred Hitchcock is to film thrillers, or H.G. Wells is to science fiction.

The superhero stories Kirby created or inspired have dominated American comic books for nearly 75 years and now hold almost oppressive sway over Hollywood. Kirby’s creations are front and center in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but his fingerprints are all over the DC Cinematic Universe too, where the master plot he created—the cosmic villain Darkseid invading earth—still looms large. It was Kirby who took the superhero genre away from its roots in 1930s vigilante stories and turned it into a canvas for galaxy-spanning space operas, a shift that not only changed comics but also prepared the way for the likes of the Star Wars franchise. Outside of comics, hints of Kirby pop up in unexpected places, such as the narrative approaches of Guillermo del Toro, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem.

If you walk down any city street, it’s hard to get more than fifty feet without coming across images that were created by Kirby or inflected by his work. Yet if you were to ask anyone in that same stretch if they had ever heard of Kirby, they’d probably say, “Who?” A century after his birth, he remains the unknown king.