Illustrated by Naomi Desai
Kirby, Boseman and August 28
to superheroes who tackled veiled versions of real-world villains like the Nazis, Jacob became Jack Kirby, the King of Comics.
On August 28, 1907, a boy named Jacob Kurtzberg was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Kurtzberg was a Jew with two quick fists, used primarily for scrapping and scribbling. Poor as he was, he tore through reams of old wallpaper and adorned the staircase of his tenement with cartoon illustrations. Entering the fray of a burgeoning genre that collected Sunday comic strips into 10-cent anthologies in the late 1930s, Jacob would emerge at the forefront of the comic book world. Changing his name and lending his talents
Wasting no time, Jack drew Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw and never stopped swinging from the 40s through the 60s. Alongside cocreators like Stan Lee, Kirby devised a slew of socially-conscious heroes with allegorical undertones: the spaceage paranoia and xenophobia of the Fantastic Four, the prejudice faced by the X-Men and the mock-UN of the Avengers. Valiant as these efforts were, these teams of fantastical characters were severely lacking in their diversity, especially in light of contemporary civil rights tensions of the 60s. This would be rectified when
Aidan Moyer
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