Jack Katz, a comic-book artist and writer 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 on April 24 in Walnut Creek, Calif., east of San Francisco. He was 97.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a friend, Brian Miller.
Mr. 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 No. 24 — a number he arrived at intentionally, as that was the number of books in Homer’s epics, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”
Mr. Katz’s own epic begins after a nuclear apocalypse, as small bands of humans try to survive among dinosaurlike mutants, monsters, gods and other fantastical beings. It becomes “a complex science fiction epic that tells of man’s migration into space, the ensuing galactic battles, and the great mystery of mankind’s origin before the fall of civilization,” as the reference site Lambiek Comiclopedia describes it.
Channeling the anything-goes spirit of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Katz brought this sweeping tale to life with lavish, multilayered illustrations, obsessing over the tiniest details. In keeping with the counterculture ethos, there was plenty of nudity, too.
His enormous ambition paid off. The revered comics pioneer Will Eisner once 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.”
Although Mr. Katz came to be considered a maverick genius by many aficionados, there was little hint during the first half of his career that he was headed for comics immortality.
Yes, he was experienced. He started in the industry in his teens and later worked for a wide variety of comics publishers, including Marvel, DC and Standard. He had worked with some of the biggest names in the business, including Stan Lee and two other major influences: Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon, and Hal Foster, of “Tarzan” and “Prince Valiant” fame.
Still, Mr. Katz had an artistic temperament, and he chafed at the commercial strictures of the business. He spent five years doing a little bit of everything at King Features Syndicate, which distributed “Blondie” and “Flash Gordon,” but he was less than sanguine about the experience.
“They had a whole stable of artists,” Mr. Katz recalled about such companies in a 2019 interview with The East Bay Times of Northern California. “It was like working in a factory.”
It did not help that his obsessive attention to detail could push deadlines — and editors — to their limit. “I used to draw the anatomy under the clothes to get the wrinkles exactly right,” he added. “It took time. Sometimes, too much.”
And he could be prickly. In a 1976 interview with The Berkeley Gazette, he described the business of that era as peopled by “a bunch of little sycophants suckling on their udders.”
Had it not been for his midcareer turn with “The First Kingdom,” the comic-book writer Steven Ringgenberg wrote in a recent appreciation in The Comics Journal, it’s likely that Mr. Katz “would have been regarded as just a journeyman artist, who tried — with little success — to make a living in comics.”
Jacob Katz was born on Sept. 27, 1927, in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. He spent part of his childhood in Ottawa and, after many moves, eventually wound up back in Brooklyn, where, he told The East Bay Times, “my parents used to get into trouble with our landlord when I was a kid” because he “was always drawing on the walls.”
As a youth, he gave himself an autodidact’s version of a fine art education, visiting the city’s museums to study the work of the Renaissance painters and other masters.
As a student at the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, he later said, 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.
During the mid-1950s, he quit comics for a time to focus on painting, earning comparisons to the American realist painters of the Ashcan School, while exhibiting in gallery shows and teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
Mr. Katz returned to comics in the late 1960s, but took another break in his 40s after leaving New York, the cradle of comic books, for the San Francisco Bay Area. His wife, Carolyn, encouraged him to pursue what would become his career-defining project, and he lived off savings for a year and a half to get “The First Kingdom” rolling.
The idea for the story was almost as old as Mr. Katz himself.
“The inspiration for ‘The First Kingdom’ came to me in a dream when I was just three years old,” he said in a 2013 interview with ICv2, an online magazine that covers what it calls “geek culture.” “Most of my major works owe their genesis to dreams I had as a kid.”
The volumes were issued originally by the publishing arm of Comics & Comix, a retailer in Berkeley, and later by Bud Plant, a founder of Comics & Comix.
After completing his masterwork, Mr. Katz continued to paint and teach art. Along the way, he published two books on the art of anatomy, two volumes of sketchbooks and another graphic novel, “Legacy,” about the mysterious fate of a billionaire’s fortune, written with the comics veteran Charlie Novinskie.
Mr. Katz’s survivors include two sons, Ivan and David, and two daughters, Beth and Laura Katz, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His three marriages ended in divorce.
Around 2013 — the year Titan Comics reissued “The First Kingdom” — Mr. Katz embarked on an ambitious follow-up to his masterwork: a 500-page graphic novel called “Beyond the Beyond,” which he financed in part through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, while toiling away on it up to 18 hours a day, often in his pajamas, he said in a 2015 video interview. He added that he already had the story by the time he was 12, and that “The First Kingdom” was basically its preamble.
“All of these people, they were, ‘Oh you’re 45, you’re over the hill!’” he told ICv2, recalling the early days of “The First Kingdom.” “I’m 85 now! I’m ready to take on ‘Beyond the Beyond’!”
That work, completed in 2019, remains unpublished. Then again, Mr. Katz understood the challenges going in.
“For heaven’s sake,” he said, “you know, if you climbed Mount Everest one time, it’s not a snap the second.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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