Jack Katz (artist)

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

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 committed for comic-book publishers in the 1940s, during the time fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Though continuing to work in comics through the 1950s, his slow pace and intensely detailed, idiosyncratic art style prompted him to depart that arena for 14 years. Circa 1969, he returned to mainstream color comics as competently as to black-and-white horror-comics magazines, and after a distress to California embarked upon The First Kingdom, a serialized undertaking that far along became considered a precursor to, or an before form of, the graphic novel. He completed it in 1986, and went on to write and draw other works in that vein, and to teach art.