Gil Kane was born Eli Katz (Latvian: Elija Kacs) on April 6, 1926, in Latvia[1] to a Jewish family who immigrated to the U.S. in 1929, settling in Brooklyn, New York City.

[2] His earliest known credit is inking Carl Hubbell on the six-page Scarlet Avenger superhero story "The Counterfeit Money Code" in MLJ's Zip Comics #14 (cover-dated May 1941), on which he signed the name "Gil Kane".

[5] That same year Kane either was drafted[3] or enlisted in the Army and served in the World War II Pacific theater of operations.

"[13] Kane and writer John Broome's stories for the Green Lantern series included transforming Hal Jordan's love interest, Carol Ferris, into the Star Sapphire in issue #16.

[14] Black Hand, a character featured prominently in the "Blackest Night" storyline in 2009–2010, debuted in issue #29 (June 1964) by Broome and Kane.

Kane then found a home at Marvel, eventually becoming the regular penciller for The Amazing Spider-Man, succeeding John Romita in the early 1970s, and becoming the company's preeminent cover artist through that decade.

[24] During that run, he and editor-writer Stan Lee produced in 1971 a three-issue story arc in The Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 (May–July 1971) that marked the first challenge to the industry's self-regulating Comics Code Authority since its inception in 1954.

[25] The comics met with such positive reception and high sales that the industry's self-censorship was undercut, and the Code soon afterward was revamped.

[31] Kane and writer Gerry Conway transformed John Jameson, an incidental character in The Amazing Spider-Man series, into the Man-Wolf.

I quickly learned that working with him Marvel-style (that's when a writer gives the artist a plot and the artist breaks down the story, panel by panel and page by page) could sometimes result in lopsided storytelling; the first two-thirds of a story would be leisurely paced, and the last third would be hellbent-for-leather as Gil tried to make up for loose storytelling in the first half [sic].

[33]Kane's side projects include two long works that he conceived, plotted and illustrated, with scripting by Archie Goodwin (writing under the pseudonym of Robert Franklin): His Name Is... Savage (Adventure House Press, 1968), a self-published, 40-page, magazine-format comics novel; and Blackmark (1971), a science-fiction/sword-and-sorcery paperback published by Bantam Books and one of the earliest examples of the graphic novel, a term not in general use at the time.

[34] During the 1970s and 1980s, Kane did character designs for various Hanna-Barbera[23] and Ruby-Spears[35] animated TV series including The Centurions which he co-created with Jack Kirby.

During this decade he also illustrated paperback and record-album covers, drew model box art, and co-wrote, with John Jakes, the 1980 novel Excalibur!

He ended up creating a science fiction/fantasy tale called Jason Drum, about an astronaut stranded on a sword and sorcery world.

Due to a medical emergency Kane reached out to Joe Staton to help with layouts and, starting with Tintin #205, uninked penciled pages were sent to France.

In 2006 Kane´s friend Gary Groth and publisher at Fantagraphics discovered that Kane did evidently finish the Jason Drum project with 44 fully inked pages with dialogue.

[37] During the following decade, Kane drew for publishers including Topps Comics, for which he illustrated a miniseries adaptation of the film Jurassic Park; Malibu Comics, for which he and writer Steven Grant created the superhero Edge for a 1994–95 miniseries; Awesome Entertainment, in which he illustrated Alan Moore's four-page Kid Thunder story "Judgment Day: 1868" in Judgment Day Alpha #1 (June 1997); and DC, for which he drew several Superman stories.

[48] He and his former apprentice Howard Chaykin worked together again on a three-part story for Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #24–26 (Nov. 1991 – Jan. 1992)[49] and the Superman: Distant Fires one-shot (1998).

[52] Though his last full comic during his lifetime was Awesome's 40-page Judgment Day: Aftermath #1 (March 1998) — written by Moore and featuring the characters and teams Glory, Spacehunter, Youngblood and others in individual tales — his final narrative works, all for DC, were penciling the two-page "Antibiotics: The Killers That Save Lives" in Celebrate the Century: Super Heroes Stamp Album #5 (1999); portions of seven pages and the cover, all shared with humor artist Sergio Aragonés, of DC's Fanboy #2 (April 1999); and a two-page pastiche of 1970s Hostess Fruit Pie superhero ads, "The Star Sheriffs", in Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins #2 (Sept. 1999).

[5] Posthumously published was his final completed work, the two-issue Green Lantern / Atom story in Legends of the DC Universe #28–29 (May–June 2000); and four years later, the final issue, drawn in the mid-1990s, of Malibu's planned four-issue miniseries Edge, as part of the iBooks hardcover collection The Last Heroes.

[1] An homage to Kane and to writer John Broome appears in In Darkest Night, a novelization of the Justice League animated series.

[67] Work by Kane was part of the 1995 Muckenthaler Cultural Center exhibit "KAPOW: A Showcase of Superheroes", in Fullerton, California.