Gil Kane
Eli Katz (born April 6, 1926, Riga, Latvia; died January 31, 2000, Florida, United States), who worked under the name Gil Kane and in a few instances Scott Edwards, was a comic book artist whose career spanned the 1940s to 1990s.
Early life and career
Kane was born to a Jewish family that emmigrated to the U.S. in 1929, settling in Brooklyn, New York City. At the age of 16, while attending the High School of Industrial Arts (now the High School of Art and Design), he began working in the comics studio system as an assistant, doing basic tasks such as drawing panel borders.
"During my summer vacation, I went up and got a job working at MLJ in 1942," Kane recalled [1], working there for three weeks before being fired. "Within a couple of days I got a job with Jack Binder's agency. Jack Binder had a loft on Fifth Avenue and it just looked like an internment camp. There must have been 50 or 60 guys up there, all at drawing tables. You had to account for the paper that you took." There Kane began pencilling professionally, but, "They weren't terribly happy with what I was doing. But when I was rehired by MLJ three weeks later, not only did they put me back into the production department and give me an increase, they gave me my first job, which was 'Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard' in Pep Comics, and then they gave me a whole issue of The Shield and Dusty, one of their leading books." Kane soon dropped out of school to work full-time.
The Silver Age
During the next several years, Kane drew for about a dozen studios and publishers including Timely Comics, a predecessor of Marvel Comics, and learned from such prominent artists as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. He interrupted his career briefly to enlist in the Army during World War II, where her served in the Pacific theater. In the post-war years, on his return to comics, he used pseudonyms including Pen Star and Gil Stack before settling on Gil Kane.
In the late 1950s, Kane, freelancing for DC Comics, helped to usher in the Silver Age of comic books 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 a landmark three-issue story arc that marked the first challenge to the rigid Comics Code since its inception in 1954. The Code forbade any mention of drugs, even in a negative context. However, The Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 (1971), written by Stan Lee, showed the negative effects of drug abuse in a storyline conceived at the request of government drug-prevention authorities. The three issues were sold without the Comics Code approval, but met with such critical acclaim and high sales that the industry's self-censorship was undercut, and the Code was revamped.
In addition, Kane drew the landmark story arc "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" in #121-122 (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 [2].
Pioneering new formats
Kane's 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 conceived, plotted and illustrated, with scripting by Archie Goodwin: His Name is... Savage (Adventure House Press, 1968), a self-published, 40-page, magazine-format comics novel; and Blackmark (1971), a science fiction/sword-and-sorcery paperback published by Bantam Books. The latter represents, arguably, the first American graphic novel, a term not in general use at the time; the back-cover blurb of the 30th-anniversary edition (ISBN 1560974567) calls it, retroactively, "the very first American graphic novel." Whether or not this is so, Blackmark is, objectively, a 119-page story of comic-book art, with captions and word balloons, published in a traditional book format. It is also the first with an original heroic-adventure character, conceived expressly for this form.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Kane did character designs for various Hanna-Barbera animated TV series. In 1977, he created the newspaper comic strip Star Hawks with writer Ron Goulart. The daily strip was known for its experimental use of a two-tier format during the first years. The strip ended in 1981.
He died of complications from cancer. The divorced Kane was survived by his second wife, Elaine.
Awards
He received numerous awards over the years, including the 1971, 1972, and 1975 National Cartoonists Society Awards for Best Story Comic Book, and their Story Comic Strip Award for 1977 for Star Hawks. He also received the Shazam Award for Special Recognition in 1971 "for Blackmark, his paperback comics novel". 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.
References
- The Comics Journal #186 (April 1996): Interview with Gil Kane, Part I (offline)
- Afterword, Blackmark 30th Anniversary Edition (Fantagraphics Books, 2002) ISBN 1560974567
- Lambiek Comiclopedia: Gil Kane
- Comic Art Grafix Gallery: Gil Kane
- Space.com, Feb. 1, 2000: "Gil Kane, Space-Age Comic Book Artist, Dies"
- Entry, Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year, 2001
- Secret Identities
- Comic Book Awards Almanac