Jack Katz was born on September 27, 1927 and passed away on April 24, 2025. He's best remembered for his graphic novel, The First Kingdom.

Jack attended the School of Industrial Art in NYC and began working for comic book publishers in the 1940s, or what is now known as the Golden Age of Comic Books.

Jack wrote under a variety of pen names: Jay Hawk, Vaughn Beering, Alac Justice, Alec Justice, and David Hadley. He began his career in the C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza Studio. He worked as a letterer in Jerry Iger's studio, and from 1946-1951 he worked as an art assistant on various King Features Syndicate comic strips. He worked on Thimble Theater, Terry and the Pirates, and Standard Comics.

In 1954, he began working under Stan Lee at Timely comics. In 1955, he left mainstream comics to paint and teach art at the YMCA. He spent 14 years on a sort of hiatus until he was impressed by Jim Steranko's Captain America, and decided to reenter mainstream comics. He joined Stan Lee again at Marvel Comics, and then worked at DC for a short while before leaving to write and illustrate for Jim Warren.

Around 1970, Jack started working at Skywalk Publications. He worked on Zangar and The Plastic Plague and finally, in the early 70s, he started writing The First Kingdom.

It was Jack's move to California that began his interest in underground comics. It took Jack 12 years to complete The First Kingdom, a 24-issue, 768-page graphic novel. He finished two books per year, ending with a total of 24 in order to mirror the number of books in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

After finishing The First Kingdom, Jack taught art at a community college in California. In 2014, he started working on beyond the Beyond, a 500-page graphic novel, and though he finished it in 2019, it was never published.

In 2020, Jack had a solo exhibition titled "The Golden Age and Beyond." In 2021, Sharpy Publishing released The Unseen Jack Katz, which was a collection of unpublished works from the 1970s and 1980s. In March 2025, Katz's collection of his own original comic art and personal items was gifted to Rice University by his former wife, Caroline Gold.

In 1982, Jack received an Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con. In 2023, he received the Will Eisner Hall of Fame Award.

Jack was married three times and had four children.