Episode Details

Jacob Kurtzberg was rejected from an art program for drawing too fast with charcoal and quit the Pratt Institute after one week. He went on to draw more than 20,000 published pages and build the visual foundation of the Marvel Universe. This episode traces Jack Kirby from a Lower East Side childhood shadowed by his father's garment factory, through teaching himself by tracing newspaper strips, to a hated in-betweener job on Popeye cartoons, and finally to comics, where he and Joe Simon created Captain America nearly a year before the United States entered World War II.

We cover his service as an advance scout drawing reconnaissance maps in occupied French towns, the postwar collapse of superheroes and his invention of the romance comics genre with Young Romance, and the Silver Age explosion with Stan Lee that produced the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, and Black Panther in 1966. We examine his working method of drawing finished pages with no preliminary sketches, the Kirby Krackle, his departure from Marvel in 1970 over credit and control, the Fourth World saga at DC with its Mother Boxes and the Stan Lee caricature Funky Flashman, and his bitter fight to recover his original art under work-for-hire law.

• How the fear of his father's garment factory drove Kirby's lifelong refusal to be an assembly-line worker
• Captain America, the profit dispute with Martin Goodman, and the seed of distrust toward Stan Lee
• Drawing reconnaissance maps under fire in World War II and how combat shaped his kinetic style
• Romance comics, Fighting American, and the Marvel Silver Age that reinvented superheroes as flawed people
• The Fourth World at DC, the 88-page art offer, and the legal battles his heirs later inherited