Today marks the birthday of one of the greatest, most influential, and innovative comic book artists of all time, the late Jack Kirby, responsible for creating and co-creating some of comicdom’s most well known and gold standard characters in the history of the genre – Captain America, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men, to name a few.

The New York Times, who had written about Kirby 10 years after his death on February 1994, by which time he had amassed a portfolio of work almost tantamount to the works of Picasso or Michelangelo in his respective field, summed up the style of the man’s art this way: