Jack Katz, a comic-book artist and writer whose 768-page magnum opus, The First Kingdom, published in installments over a dozen years starting in 1974, was widely credited with helping give birth to the long-form graphic novel, died on April 24 in Walnut Creek, California, east of San Francisco. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by a friend, Brian Miller.

Katz published The First Kingdom, a blend of fantasy and science fiction with philosophical underpinnings, in two books every year until he reached Issue No. 24 — a number he arrived at intentionally, as that was the number of books in Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Katz’s own epic begins after a nuclear apocalypse, as small bands of humans try to survive among dinosaurlike mutants, monsters, gods and other fantastical beings. It becomes “a complex science fiction epic that tells of man’s migration into space, the ensuing galactic battles, and the great mystery of mankind’s origin before the fall of civilisation”, as the reference site Lambiek Comiclopedia describes it.