Life

Jack Kirby was an American comic book artist, writer and editor, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. He grew up in New York City and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He helped create hundreds of original characters, including Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.

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A font of inspiration, conflicts, science fiction and mythic storytelling. Kirby’s art—his visual prowess—is why we’re here. At the most basic level his signature motifs include extreme foreshortening, the squiggle, and the “Kirby Krackle.” Most of Kirby’s art was drawn to serve a story he was telling. His goal was to pull his readers in, make them feel that they were in the story, the outside world peeling away, as if they were in a theater watching a movie. Kirby Krackle (also known as Kirby Dots) is an artistic convention in superhero and science fiction comic books and similar illustrations, in which a field of black is used to represent negative space around unspecified kinds of energy. Kirby Krackles are typically used in illustrations of explosions, smoke, the blasts from ray guns, "cosmic" energy, and outer space phenomena.