Comic book artist and writer Jack Katz, "whose 768-page magnum opus, The First Kingdom, published in installments over a dozen years starting in 1974, was widely credited with helping give birth to the long-form graphic novel," died April 24, the New York Times reported. He was 97.
Katz published The First Kingdom, "a sprawling blend of fantasy and science fiction with philosophical underpinnings," in two books every year until he reached issue #24, a number he arrived at intentionally because it was the number of books in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Times noted.
Comics pioneer Will Eisner called The First Kingdom "one of the most awesome undertakings in modern comic book history." Jerry Siegel, who created Superman with Joe Shuster, wrote that "reading The First Kingdom is like seeing captured on paper glimpses of a dream world depicted by an artist with remarkable creative vision."
Katz started his career in the industry in his teens and later worked for a variety of comics publishers, including Marvel, DC and Standard. Although he worked with some of the biggest names in the business, including Stan Lee, Alex Raymond, and Hal Foster, Katz "had an artistic temperament, and he chafed at the commercial strictures of the business," the Times wrote.
In a recent appreciation in the Comics Journal, comic book writer Steven Ringgenberg observed that had it not been for his midcareer turn with The First Kingdom, it is likely that Katz "would have been regarded as just a journeyman artist, who tried--with little success--to make a living in comics."
Katz had recalled that, as a student at the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, "he was awful at every subject but art. He got his first taste of the business as a teenager, penciling for Archie Comics and drawing the superhero Bulletman for Fawcett. He later worked on a variety of projects, including war and Western books, for Atlas Comics, which would evolve into Marvel," the Times noted.
During the mid-1950s, he quit comics to focus on painting, then returned to the field in the late 1960s, but took another break in his 40s after leaving New York for the San Francisco Bay Area. His wife, Carolyn, encouraged him to pursue what became The First Kingdom. The volumes were originally issued by the publishing arm of Berkeley's Comics & Comix, and later by Bud Plant, a founder of Comics & Comix.
Katz continued to paint and teach art. He published two books on the art of anatomy, two volumes of sketchbooks, and another graphic novel, Legacy. Katz also created "an ambitious follow-up to his masterwork: a 500-page graphic novel called Beyond the Beyond," which he financed in part through an Indiegogo campaign, the Times wrote. That work, completed in 2019, remains unpublished.
He was realistic about the odds against replicating his earlier book's success, saying, "For heaven's sake, you know, if you climbed Mount Everest one time, it's not a snap the second."