Jack Kirby quotes

Jack Kirby was an American cartoonist and comic book artist, widely regarded as one of the most influential creators in the history of comics. His dynamic storytelling and bold artistic style helped define the superhero genre, co-creating iconic characters like Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. He is remembered as the “King of Comics” and a visionary whose legacy continues to shape the industry. Here are 25 of his quotes:

Perfectionists are their own devils.

Jack Kirby

The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists.

Jack Kirby

Life at best is bittersweet.

Jack Kirby

I was handed a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told to go kill Hitler.

Jack Kirby

I feel that story, first. I know those people, first. When I put them down they've already lived.

Jack Kirby

I never do fairy tale people, I do people just as they are.

Jack Kirby

There was power in the work of Jack Kirby that changed the way I looked at things. There was no one else like him and there never will be.

Jack Kirby

Well, it was a radical concept to me. Like any other American, I wasn't sophisticated enough to study all its facets. All I knew about it was it was foreign to democracy. And here I was, I had been fighting for democracy and always aware of two political parties and brought up in that kind of atmosphere. Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn't want to see a thing like that.

Jack Kirby

My favorite thing about Kirby's artwork was his storytelling. He was really a film director doing comics.

Jack Kirby

Oh, communism! That was a burning issue. It was an outrageous issue. To be termed a communist would damage your whole family, damage your whole world - your friends wouldn't talk to you. I'm talking about other people - because I wouldn't go near the stuff. Sure, I was against the reds. I became a witch hunter. My enemies were the commies - I called them commies. In fact, Granny Goodness was a commie, Doubleheader was a commie.

Jack Kirby

His real dream was to make movies.

Jack Kirby

Superheroes may be superhuman in stature but inside they're human beings and they act and react as human beings. It doesn't matter whether you're doing legendary characters like Hercules or modern characters, you'll find that humans are humans and they'll react the same way in certain situations.

Jack Kirby

I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge - what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn't draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him you wouldn't faint dead away. There was nothing disgusting in his demeanor. There was nothing about him that repelled you. My monsters were lovable monsters.

Jack Kirby

The romance genre was all around us. There was love story pulps, and there was love story sections in the newspapers. There was love stories in the movies. Wherever you went there was love stories! That's how we got our new material, and it suddenly struck me that that's what we haven't done. We haven't done any romance stories!

Jack Kirby

I can't get over this guy. He creates 100 villains at a sitting and then kills off half of them. Any one of these villains I can make a million off of.

Jack Kirby

Unlike other comic book creators who were given either stateside or way-behind-lines assignments, and perhaps because Kirby understood Yiddish, the Jewish German dialect spoken by his family, he was sent as a scout behind enemy lines to draw maps. He endured and survived many harrowing violent experiences during his service, almost losing his feet to trench foot. He had no time for fascists or racists.

Jack Kirby

I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school that's what kept me in school - it wasn't mathematics and it wasn't geography; it was history.

Jack Kirby

Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn't want to see a thing like that.

Jack Kirby

I enjoyed working on any story. I'm essentially a storyteller. You name the subject, and I'll give a good story on it.

Jack Kirby

I knew this much - that everybody voted Democrat down my way. If you were poor, you voted Democrat and if you were rich you voted Republican.

Jack Kirby

I was a young man. I was still growing out of the East Side. The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I'd beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it.

Jack Kirby

No, we didn't do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the "Strange World of Your Dreams.”.

Jack Kirby