Gil Kane
Eli Katz (April 6, 1926–January 31, 2000), who worked under the name Gil Kane and in a few instances Scott Edwards, was a comic book illustrator whose career spanned the 1940s to 1990s.
Kane was born in Riga, Latvia to a Jewish family. His family moved to the United States in 1929, settling in Brooklyn.
At the age of 16, while attending the High School of Industrial Art, he began working in the comics studio system as an assistant, doing basic tasks such as drawing panel borders. Within a month, he was pencilling and inking illustrations, and soon dropped out of school to work full-time.
During the next several years, he worked for about a dozen studios and publishers (including Timely Comics, which later became Marvel Comics) and learned from prominent artists such as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. He interrupted his career briefly to enlist in the Army during World War II.
During the late 1950s, Kane worked increasingly for DC Comics, and helped to usher in the Silver Age when he became the chief artist for a series of new superhero titles loosely based on 1940s characters, notably Green Lantern and The Atom.
He also continued to work for Marvel and illustrated many of Marvel's leading titles during the 1960s and '70s, becoming the company's preeminent cover artist for a time and serving as regular penciller during an important period on The Amazing Spider-Man in the early 1970s.
During that run he drew the story "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" in #'s 121 and 122 (June-July 1973), in which Spider-Man's fiancée Gwen Stacy was killed. His depiction of her death scene remains controversial as the direct cause of her demise is ambigously depicted [1].
His distinctive style, which combined the detailed figure drawing of Frank Frazetta with the stylized violence and exaggerated motion of Jack Kirby, greatly influenced other Marvel superhero artists during this period. Characters he helped create for Marvel include Iron Fist and Morbius the Living Vampire.
Kane's side projects include two long works that he wrote and illustrated: His Name is...Savage (1968), a self-published magazine, and Blackmark (Bantam Books, 1971). Unusually for the time, these were published as single volumes rather than serials and are therefore considered to be examples of early, prototypical graphic novels. During the 1970s and 1980s he did character designs for various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
In 1977 he created the newspaper strip Star Hawks with writer Ron Goulart. The strip was known for its experimental use of a two-tier format for the daily strip during the first years. The strip ended in 1981.
To honor his more than five decades of achievement, Kane was named to both the Eisner Award Hall of Fame and the Harvey Award Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1997.
He died in 2000 in Florida, of complications from cancer.