Writer and artist Jack Katz, best known for his 24-issue First Kingdom epic series of independently published comic books, passed away on April 24th. He was 97.
He worked at a variety of comic book publishers from the 1940s on. He also worked as an assistant to King Features cartoonists.
"He met Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, two of the artists he considered his biggest influences. Foster, in particular, was his favorite artist from the age of 6. The former’s epic Prince Valiant was a major influence on Katz’s First Kingdom project, because of its broad scope and huge, varied cast. Foster told Katz that drawing comic books was a waste of his talents, Katz said, in his 2010 interview. Veteran Superman artist Stan Kaye told Katz that he should keep at it.
"... By 1955, he had left the comics industry to become a teacher and painter. He taught classes at the New York City YMCA, and he also had a small number of private students. This break from drawing comics lasted for 14 years.
In 1969, inspired by Jim Steranko’s innovative work on Marvel’s Captain America title, Katz returned to comic books. He worked for a variety of publishers during his second career in comics. He went back to Marvel and contributed to such titles as Sub-Mariner, Monsters on the Prowl and Adventure into Fear. For the first time, Katz also did work for Marvel’s rival, DC, drawing stories for House of Secrets and romance comics like Young Love, Heart Throbs, Falling in Love and others. He also contributed to Jim Warren’s Creepy during this time, writing, penciling and inking." - TCJ
Influenced by the success of underground comix, Katz began his own epic series in 1974.
The First Kingdom was a twelve year, twenty-four issue effort by Jack that was, as Lambiek’s Comiclopedia says, “a complex science fiction epic that tells of man’s migration into space, the ensuing galactic battles, and the great mystery of mankind’s origin before the fall of civilization.”
A number of stylistic touches set Katz's illustrative style in Kingdom apart from that of other comic artists. It is highly detailed. All of his human (and humanoid) forms have ideal, heroic bodies rendered with anatomical accuracy; and there are no gutters, with murals filling single-panel pages throughout the work. The quality of Katz's art matures as he progresses further into the story: the panels get larger and he shifts from pen to brush in the fifth book, a suggestion from Jim Steranko.[24]
Will Eisner and Jerry Siegel[25] among many others considered Kingdom to be innovative in many respects. In the foreword to issue #23, Eisner claims the work helped carve a niche for the graphic-novel medium. Comics historian R. C. Harvey believes Katz was the "...first person in comics to pursue a personal vision at such length'".[26] Katz's stated intention in the first issue was to trailblaze: "The work I am undertaking...is the first in a series of books in which I hope to extend the dimension of comics to the potential art form that one of its earliest and greatest artists, Hal Foster, laid down the foundations for."[27]
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