Airboy and afterward
In 1942, he joined Hillman Periodicals, where he drew such features as "Iron Ace" (from its premiere in Air Fighters Comics #2, Nov. 1942),[5] "Boy King" and "Gunmaster", and the following year began work on his most prominent Golden Age character, Airboy. That aviation hero, created by writer Charles Biro with scripter Dick Wood and artist Al Camy, appeared initially in Air Fighters Comics, later renamed Airboy Comics.[4] Aside from Airboy himself, the feature was known for the sexy antagonist Valkyrie, a cleavage-baring Axis aviatrix who soon defected and became his ally.[6]
Kida remained on the feature through 1948, afterward working with writer Biro on such Hillman crime comics as the seminal Crime Does Not Pay.[4] From 1949 to 1951, he drew Western, crime and romance comics for Lev Gleason Publications, signing some stories Kid or KID.[4] In 1952, he left to freelance for Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel Comics. There he worked on characters including the Western gunslingers the Ringo Kid and the Two-Gun Kid and the medieval hero the Black Knight, plus humor, horror, war and Bible stories.[4]
Kida returned to Marvel in the 1970s, primarily as an inker, working on such characters as Iron Man, Godzilla, Ka-Zar, Luke Cage and Man-Wolf, plus Captain Britain for Marvel UK. His final known full comic-book credit is the superhero-team title The Defenders #72 (June 1979) — featuring Marvel's unrelated character Valkyrie. His last known published comic-book work was artwork for the two-page text feature "Re-Educating Valkyrie" in Eclipse Comics's Valkyrie! #1 (May 1987), one of that publisher's revamped Airboy comics, and penciling the character entry for the Grand Director in Marvel's The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #17 (Aug. 1987).[4]
