During much of his career Katz was a journeyman artist, working under his own name and the pen names Vaughn Beering, David Hadley, and Jay Hawk. Born Jacob Katz in Brooklyn, New York, on September 27, 1927, he attended the School of Industrial Art in New York City and began working in the comics industry in 1943, at the age of 16, working on C. C. Beck and Pete Costanza’s Bulletman (Fawcett Comics). He then moved on to Jerry Iger’s studio around 1945. In 1946 he went to work at King Features Syndicate as an art assistant on Terry and the Pirates, Thimble Theatre, and other strips, and there he met the two artists who were his biggest inspirations, Hal Foster and Alex Raymond. During this time he continued to work on comics, including Quality Comics’ Doll Man. In 1951 he decamped for Standard Comics, and in 1952 he went to work in the studio of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. At this point Katz had already developed a detailed style, which slowed him down considerably, and Kirby and Simon ultimately let him go. Stan Lee hired him at Atlas Comics (later Marvel), where, again, his slow pace was a problem. In 1955, Katz left the comics industry and turned to teaching.
He returned to the drawing board 14 years later, working for Marvel Comics and DC Comics as well as the black-and-white publisher Skywald (on titles like Tender Love Stories, Jungle Adventures, and Psycho). In the early 1970s he moved to California and, inspired by the early underground comix movement, started working on his magnum opus, The First Kingdom.
Katz went on to create several other graphic novels, including Legacy (published by Graphic Novel Literature in 2009), as well as art instruction books. He took up oil painting in the mid-1950s and returned to it in the late 1980s, and for much of his life he taught art. He received the Inkpot Award in 1977 and was inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame in 2023.
