Jack Katz (artist)

In September 2021, Liam Sharp's Sharpy Publishing released The Unseen Jack Katz, a collection of unpublished works from the 1970s and 1980s. Funded as a Kickstarter project, the book contained various unfinished stories & comic strips by Katz.

In October 2020, Katz had a solo exhibition in Berkeley, California titled "The Golden Age and Beyond". The exhibit featured art from his entire career including comic art and paintings.

October 24–25, 2020 - Exhibit - "Jack Katz: The Golden and Beyond" Berkeley, CA

In 2019, Katz began a new graphic novel, which he says will be 330 pages long. This new novel is a sequel to Beyond the Beyond.

In 2014, Katz began work on Beyond the Beyond, a 500-page graphic novel, which was a continuation of his themes developed in The First Kingdom series. The book was finished in 2019, but remains unpublished.

Since the Kingdom years, Katz has focused on teaching art at a community college in Albany, California, painting and working on graphic novels. Students of his have helped publish a number of books of his works. These include an anatomy book for students (Anatomy by Jack Katz, Volume One) and two books of his sketches (Jack Katz Sketches, Vol. 1 and Jack Katz Sketches, Vol. 2). In 2009, Graphic Novel Literature published Katz's second graphic novel, Legacy. Charlie Novinskie, former president of Century Comics, helped script Legacy.

In 1988, Katz returned to oil painting and completed many works from 1988 – 2003. During this time, Katz also was teaching art in Northern California. After 2003, Katz stopped painting and returned to drawing and developing comic book stories.

July 11, 1986 - KGO TV Friday Focus profile - San Francisco, CA interviewed by Steve Davis

September 30, 1983 - WXRT Chicago - FM RADIO with Charlie Myerson

July 4, 1982 - Creature Features -  Channel 2 KTVU  - Oakland CA

November 3, 1979 - Creature Features - Channel 2 KTVU  - Oakland CA

In 1978, Katz teamed up with his friend Thomas Scortia to create a short-lived comic strip, Galactic Prime. The strip was launched on July 5, 1978, and ran for only seven weeks in his local newspaper, the North East Bay Independent and Gazette.

Attempts have been made to reissue Kingdom as collected volumes. Wallaby Pocket Books published a large-format version of the first six books in 1978. In 2005, Century Comics (under its former name, Mecca Comics Group) released the first volume of an anticipated four-volume set, collecting issues #1–6. The second volume collected issues #7–12 and followed months later, but Century Comics went out of business before it could publish the final two volumes. In May 2013, Titan Comics announced plans to reprint the series in six volumes, remastered from the original art and relettered.

August 29, 1976 - Creature Features - Channel 2  KTVU   - Oakland CA

Katz was one of the recipients of the Inkpot Award in 1976 at the San Diego Comic-Con.

The epic was published by Comics & Comix Co. from 1974 to 1977, at which point publication was taken over by Bud Plant (a Comics & Comix co-founder) and completed in 1986. Early praise for Kingdom came from Playboy magazine and the Rocket's Blast Comicollector fanzine, but it was never a commercial success due in part to the frequency with which it came out and its adult content. Another contributing factor may have been that Kingdom was sold strictly through mail-order, specialty comic stores and head shops.

In the early 1970s, Katz drew numerous romance comics for DC and Marvel Comics.

Katz got a job with Skywald Publications around 1970, where he believed that he would be able to write his own stories. While there he worked on "Zangar" (from the Jungle Adventures comic book) and is credited with the full art and script for "The Plastic Plague" in the horror-comics magazine Nightmare #14 (Aug. 1973). While remaining with Skywald as an associate editor, Katz moved to California in the early 1970s. It was there he began writing The First Kingdom, integrating into the story ideas that he'd had since his time with Warren Publications.

Impressed by Jim Steranko's Captain America, Katz entered mainstream comics for a second time in 1969 and bounced around from job to job. He first found work with Stan Lee at Marvel Comics and worked on books such as Sub-Mariner, Monsters on the Prowl and Adventure into Fear. Katz then worked on House of Secrets and romance comics for DC before moving on to write and illustrate stories for Jim Warren.

September 1962 - Exhibit - Panoras Gallery, New York, NY

In 1956, Katz left the comic book industry and began painting and teaching art in Brooklyn. In September 1962, his work was featured in a one-man show at the Panoras Gallery in Manhattan at 62 West 56th Street. Katz continued to paint through the early 1960s, though there are no records of many of these works.

Katz went to work for Standard Comics and its imprints in 1951, doing horror comics, war comics and some romance comics until the company went out of business. From this period comes some of the earliest work that can be identified as his, such as Adventures into Darkness #10 (June 1953). From 1952 to 1956, Katz worked as a penciler and inker at the studio of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, working alongside Mort Meskin and Marvin Stein. Kirby taught Katz how to ink and use lighting to emphasize dramatic scenes. A slow worker due to heavy detailing (influenced by the style of illustrator Dean Cornwell), Katz was let go and moved on to Timely Comics under Stan Lee around 1954. Katz worked on war and horror comics, as well as Westerns, but his pacing continued to cause friction. Without Lee's knowledge, Katz worked on the side for Fiction House, which slowed him down even more. In 1955 he left mainstream comics to paint and teach art, both privately and for the YMCA in New York City. His hiatus from the industry lasted 14 years.

From 1946 to 1951, he worked as an art assistant on various King Features Syndicate comic strips. Katz worked on Thimble Theatre as an assistant artist, working with Bela Zaboly and Louis Trakis. Katz worked briefly on Terry and the Pirates as an assistant to George Wunder. As a "detail man", he came into contact with Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, two of the artists who inspired him most in his early years. Katz has considered Foster his "guiding light" since the age of six and believes Foster laid the foundations for the graphic novel. Raymond praised Katz's illustrative style and said that working in comics was a waste of his time. Stanley Kaye, on the other hand, told Katz to persevere.

Katz's work in mainstream comics spans both the Golden and Silver Ages, and was done under a variety of pseudonyms such as Jay Hawk, Vaughn Beering, Alac Justice, Alec Justice, and David Hadley. He got his start in the industry in 1943, working in the C. C. Beck and Pete Costanza studio on that duo's feature Bulletman. In 1944 or 1945, working as a letterer in the comics studio of Jerry Iger, he became acquainted with artist Matt Baker, whom he considered "one of the top illustrators, and a good storyteller".

Influenced by such illustrative comic-strip artists as Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, Katz attended the School of Industrial Art in New York City. He began working for comic-book publishers in the 1940s, during the period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Though continuing to work in comics through the 1950s, his slow pace and highly detailed, idiosyncratic art style prompted him to leave that field for 14 years. Circa 1969, he returned to mainstream color comics as well as to black-and-white horror-comics magazines, and after a move to California embarked upon The First Kingdom, a serialized work that later became considered a precursor to, or an early form of, the graphic novel. He completed it in 1986, and went on to write and draw further works in that vein, and to teach art.

Katz's painting style, like his comic art style, focuses on human subjects and anatomy. "The figures in the paintings...embrace, entwine, writhe, contort, and suckle. The work blends the realistic with the exaggerated. It is a 1930s, 1940s world, its view unimpeded by fifty years of art trends and theory. The Ashcan School comes to mind."

Jack Katz (born September 27, 1927) is an American comic book artist and writer, painter and art teacher known for his graphic novel The First Kingdom, a 24-issue epic he began during the era of underground comix.