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Joseph Kubert was born on September 18, 1926 in the shtetl of Yzeran, Poland. He came to the United States with his family as an infant and was raised in Brooklyn, New York. At 11 or 12, he landed an after-school job as an office boy for a comic-book publisher. By the time he was a teenager, he had worked sweeping up, erasing, inking and eventually drawing comic books. The first comic he illustrated himself, Volton, was published when he was 16. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, he served stateside in the Army before becoming a full-time artist.

He was most closely associated with DC, for whom he drew Sgt. Rock, a World War II infantryman he created with the writer Robert Kanigher, and Hawkman, an airborne crime fighter. He also created Tor, a prehistoric hero, and, with Kanigher, Enemy Ace, whose antihero is a German pilot. He was also considered one of the definitive interpreters of Tarzan. In the early 1950s he helped develop the methods of drawing and reproduction that made possible the 3-D comic book. From 1967 to 1976, he was DC's director of publications.

He wrote and illustrated several graphic novels including Fax from Sarajevo, Yossel, Jew Gangster, and Dong Xoai. He also illustrated the mid-1960s newspaper comic strip Tales of the Green Beret and a comic strip The Adventures of Yaakov and Yosef for the children's magazine The Moshiach Times. In 1976, he founded the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, the country's only accredited trade school for comic-book artists, where he helped train a generation of young colleagues. He died of multiple myeloma on August 12, 2012 at the age of 85.

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