The impossible writing credits of Stan Lee’s younger brother
In 1995, Stan Lee and his crack team of lawyer/ghostwriters created a character for the benefit of Will Murray and his “corrective”article in Comics Scene. The character was a version of Lee’s younger brother Larry Lieber who would travel through time and write scripts for those pesky uncredited and unsigned Jack Kirby “monster” stories. Kirby was conveniently dead at the time and no one else would raise any objections. Lieber, forced to play himself in the role, was timid and malleable, susceptible to threats by his brother to take away his only source of income, the Marvel newspaper strips. He was only too willing to testify to Lee’s false narrative.
Roy Thomas was still out in the cold until at least 1997, when he stated for his Kirby Collector interview with Jim Amash that Lee would never claim he hadn’t spoken to Kirby before writing the FF #1 “outline.” The year after that misstep, Thomas was given a chance to redeem himself using his Alter Ego bully pulpit and a Comic Book Artist “interview” under the same cover.
It was in that interview, a “conversation” with Lee that Thomas made it clear that he wasn’t above leading the witness, or in fact telling Lee what “facts” had been agreed upon in their new narrative. Since Thomas was new to the operation, he could be forgiven for not having a full grasp of all the details himself. He seemed unaware Lieber had been added to the plot, upgraded to “Writer for All of Kirby’s Work That Lee Hadn’t Signed.” Instead, Thomas mentioned Lieber in passing: “in these minor stories that you mostly wrote, along with Larry Lieber…” (Neither Lee nor Lieber had written a [choose your preferred adjective] thing for Kirby before the superhero credits.)
What was the basis of Team Lee’s strategy? Lee and his henchmen (would Arthur Lieberman object to being called Lee’s henchman?) aimed to discredit Kirby after his 1990 Comics Journal interview. The specific target was this response:
GROTH: And you two collaborated on all the monster stories?
KIRBY: Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did.
After claiming that same writing credit for himself for over two decades, Lee suddenly relinquished the title to his brother to try to counter what Kirby had said and written in the years just prior to his death.
The Interview
The year after the “conversation,” Thomas was given the opportunity to make up for his oversight with his own comprehensive interview of Lieber. In it, he gives a master class in writing false history with his questions and captions. He begins by trying to get Lieber to talk about his first credited work, a pencilled story in 1951 (he was credited for pencils on a story he signed in All True Crime #44, cover dated May). Lieber would have none of it, not even a few questions later when Thomas repeated the question: he wanted to talk about his launch into writing, and 1958 sounded like a good place to start. Here are some excerpts (comments in bold).
RT [Roy Thomas]: In ’50-’51, would you have been drawing or writing or both?
LIEBER: The writing I didn’t do. When I came out after the service, I went to the Art Students’ League, and I still wanted to be an artist and do comics, but I had in mind to eventually become an illustrator. I was drawing, but I was slow. I didn’t have the skill to draw quickly, and in 1958 I had to earn a living. And Stan, at the time — well, things were bad. He had almost nobody working for him.
RT: That was right after the American News collapse, when Goodman’s comics almost closed down for about a year.
LIEBER: Wait a minute—I did do some comics then. I did some romance comics. I was penciling them. And there was a point where I did writing, because I remember Stan saying to me, “You write romances really well,” so I must have written some. In 1958 Stan said he wanted somebody to help him write, and he had nobody then; he was doing it all himself. I said, “I’m really not a writer.” He said, “Oh, I’ve read your letters.” So I probably wrote the romances sometime after that.
“I probably wrote…” Prior to Marvel opening the credit vault to him recently and the Grand Comics Database (GCD, comics.org) following suit based on no evidence whatsoever, Lieber had a pencils-only credit on a further eight stories in the 1950s.
RT: When the comics were just getting started up again.
LIEBER: Well, they were putting out… let’s see… Journey into Mystery… Tales to Astonish…. I remember Jack Kirby was usually doing the lead story, and Don Heck was there. Ditko used to do the story at the end of the books, and later he and Stan did Amazing Adult Fantasy. At the time I had a room in Tudor City, and I was writing stories for Jack to draw. Jack was so fast, and I was learning to write. You can appreciate this, I’m sure: I didn’t really know how, and Stan was giving me a writing course!
[…]
I remember that Kirby was so fast he could draw faster than I was writing! Stan would say to me, “Jack needs another script!”
“Jack needs another script…” The entire account is ludicrous on its face, but the suggestion that Kirby needed a script from Lee or Lieber is the biggest lie in the story. “I’m of the mind that Jack needed no one to ‘write’ these pedestrian monster stories.”—Michael J Vassallo
RT: You mentioned earlier that Stan would say to you, “Jack needs a story now.” Did you plot some of those lead monster stories, as well?
LIEBER: No. Stan made up the plot, and then he’d give it to me, and I’d write the script.
RT: Would Jack have already penciled the story?
LIEBER: No. These were all scripts in advance.
“…all scripts in advance.” This sad little detail is the downfall of Lieber’s entire claim.
RT: So this wasn’t “Marvel style” yet? I asked Stan recently just how that style started. He felt maybe Fantastic Four #1 was the start of it, but I wondered if, by 1961 and before, he was already doing some things plots-in-advance for Jack and others.
LIEBER: No, I think it started with Fantastic Four; or around the time he did the super-heroes.
RT: So you’d turn Stan’s plots into a full script for Jack or whoever?
LIEBER: Or for Don Heck, or someone. Stan liked writing his own stories for Ditko. Jack I always had to send a full script to.
“Jack I always had to send a full script to.” Of all of the “artists” who needed him to write for them, Lieber believed Kirby was the neediest because his brother kept him completely insulated from reality.
RT: Didn’t you make up “Don Blake” when you scripted the first Thor story?
LIEBER: I probably did. I wrote a full script and sent it off to Jack.
“I probably did.” Lieber will become more certain of the false words put in his mouth by the interviewer as the years pass.
RT: Your first super-hero work seems to be Thor in Journey into Mystery #83. That came out in the summer of ’62, so you’d have done the script in the Spring, if not before.
LIEBER: One incident I remember with you and me was: I was in the office, and you came in. You’d been poring over Bulfinch Mythology or something, and you said, “Larry, where did you find this ‘uru hammer’ in mythology?” And I said, “Roy, I didn’t find it; I made it up.” And you looked at me like, “Why the hell did you make it up?” You went and found the hammer original name, Mjolnir.
“You went and found…” Again Lieber avoids commenting on Thomas’ false statement, but instead credits him with introducing the correct name for Thor’s hammer. Like many Thomas “creations,” it was something Kirby had done first, in this case in 1942.
RT: By that stage, of course, Stan was doing the plots and Jack was breaking down the stories. Did you realize your career was entering a new phase with all these super-heroes, or was the Thor origin just another story to you?
LIEBER: Thor was just another story. I didn’t think about it at all. Stan said, “I’m trying to make up a character,” and he gave me the plot, and he said, “Why don’t you write the story?”
“I’m trying to make up a character…” Lee’s definition of making up a character was taking possession of that character’s concept pages when Goodman handed them over from the blitz pile submitted by Kirby. To be clear, the character Lee “made up” came to him already made up and with plots.
RT: You were still writing full scripts when you did Thor? I know it’s got to be hard to remember after almost forty years. You wrote the first half dozen or so Thor stories.
LIEBER: I wrote that many? I thought it was just two or three…
“I thought it was just two or three…” In fact it was just two or three, between the introduction of credits and the firing of Lieber as Kirby’s “scripter.”
RT: I never knew that. Stan probably doesn’t remember. I always assumed Jack broke down the stories, because that’s what he was doing for Stan.
LIEBER: Let me put it this way: I wouldn’t swear to it, but I have no recollection of ever writing a story that had already been penciled. A full script is the only way I know how to write.
“…the only way I know how to write.” There’s that damning little detail again, but Lieber will not be dissuaded.
RT: Why would Stan have not written the whole Thor story, which was obviously the thing —if anything was—that was going to sell the magazine, and yet he’d write backup stories drawn by not just Ditko, but by Don Heck, Paul Reinman? I’ve never quite been able to figure that out. Of course, he did plot the Thor story.
LIEBER: He thought of it: The only thing I can think of is that he didn’t know it was going to be that big a feature.
“He thought of it…” Lee did not plot the origin story for Thor and he wasn’t the one who “thought of it.” As with Dr Strange, he was initially betting against the character’s success by delegating the dialogue to his inexperienced brother.
RT: So you and he were continuing the method used in the monster books. The only difference is that, when Stan did start writing full stories himself, he would get Jack or someone, or later Ditko on Spider-Man, to break down the story.
LIEBER: When he saw that the strips had potential, he started writing them, and he was working with Jack. Then, I think he was doing so much that he found it was better—and also, when you’re working with a guy like Jack—Jack was very creative, and wanted to put a lot of things into it. Jack always welcomed doing it, I’d imagine, to some extent… But Jack was so creative, and he probably welcomed it.
“…[Jack] probably welcomed it.” Since the freelancers worked from home and rarely met, Lee was able to control what Lieber and Ditko (and later Thomas and Romita) believed about his working relationship with Kirby, who never welcomed Lee tampering with his stories.
LIEBER: It was easier for Stan, once he had the pictures there, to fit in copy. I remember he’d say, “Oooh, there’s a little space, I can put a word balloon there. This would be good.” It was very easy for him, and it worked beautifully.
Aside: Lieber praises one of Lee’s Principles of Dialoguing Other People’s Work: if there’s “a little space,” fill it with words no matter how superfluous. Sadly, the words didn’t always fit.
My personal favourite is a panel from Thor #144, where Lee turns Kirby’s six-word margin note into 46 words that describe what the reader can already see in the panel. The balloon sprawl that obliterates a chunk of Kirby’s artwork (before Colletta even touches the page) is a mark of the sheer arrogance that gave preeminence to the excess words.
But back to the interview.
The Interview Captions
Thomas captioned the illustrations he chose for the interview after it was conducted, each promoting the false narrative. Notably they indicate that he wasn’t completely on board with all the details.
The information presented in the captions is completely false, promoting the Lee/Thomas invented version of history. The uncredited story signed “Kirby + Ayers” was more than “quite probably” written (plotted and dialogued) by Kirby. The “writer’s credit” for Lee was not in fact a credit (four issues before credits were instituted) but a Lee signature, which on a Kirby story would signify nothing more than the pages passing within the reach of Lee’s pen.
Steve Ditko wrote that he never got a script from Lee, so the Ditko story was written by their normal collaboration method, a story conference followed by a “synopsis.” The Don Heck story is still an open question, but some of the work he pencilled was known to be plotted by Kirby. In the first two captions, Thomas proves with his verb choice (“dialogued”) that he doesn’t believe Lieber’s “full scripts” claim.
In the case of Iron Man, Don Heck presented a different version of events to Lieber’s claim: Heck stated that he was read the plot over the phone by Lee. Unbeknownst to Lee, Kirby had left a hidden signature in the form of a recycled Green Arrow plot that, while relaying it to Heck and Lieber, Lee represented as his own.
Other Interviews
In another interview published in 2007, Lieber confided something that he’d never have said to Thomas, that his writing wasn’t earning him a subsistence wage. Not only did big brother keep him living in poverty, but as Abraham Josephine Riesman revealed in True Believer, Lee delighted in rubbing Lieber’s nose in their difference in station. Here Lieber recounts the Tudor City midnight post office story he’d related to Thomas, but with an added detail.
DB [Daniel Best]: Tales To Astonish, Tales Of Suspense…
LL [Larry Lieber]: Yeah, those books right. They were five page stories or seven page stories, he would make up the plot then he would give it to me and I would write it. At the time I was living in a place called Tudor City, in a furnished room. I would write and I wrote stories for Jack Kirby who was so fast; he was drawing faster than I could write. I had to keep feeding him stories; he needed them to earn a living. I think he was living in New Jersey at the time and I’d go to the post office on Saturday night and send the stuff there.
Lieber can perhaps be forgiven for mixing up the details (a courtesy that would never be extended to Kirby); Kirby lived on Long Island not far from Lieber’s own brother. It’s the overall picture that Lieber didn’t seem to grasp: he testified under oath in 2011 that he never mailed a script to “an artist,” but always dealt directly with Lee.
DB: Now for a writer who thought he couldn’t really write, you probably wrote more stories for Jack Kirby than anyone else outside of Stan and probably Joe Simon.
LL: Did I? Amazing. You would know better than I. I did write them for a few years.
“You would know better than I.” Once again, Lieber becomes confused about who is telling the story. The interviewer credits him with writing every Kirby story not signed by Lee rather than the reality, which turns out to be fewer than ten.
In the 1960’s it was a very relaxed atmosphere… I don’t look back on the days with fondness because I barely got a living and I wasn’t the artist that I wanted to be and they just were not happy days for me at all. But that’s what it was.
The following year, Lieber spoke to Danny Fingeroth.
DANNY FINGEROTH: When you would write for Stan, Larry, the credits would say, “plot by Stan Lee, script by Larry Lieber, pencils by whoever.” Take me through how that worked.
LARRY LIEBER: Stan would give me a plot, usually typed. Just a paragraph or so. “Thor does this and that,” and then he’d say, “Now, go home and write me a script.” When I started writing for him in 1958, I hadn’t written before…DF: So when the credits say that a story was plotted by Stan, and scripted by you, it was never a matter of Stan talking it out with, say, Kirby, and then you getting the pencils and putting the dialogue in?
LL: Oh, no, no, no. It was always a full script done by me. I never worked in what later became known as “the Marvel style…”But when I was starting off, I started with, what is it, “Grog the Creature” [laughter], you know, those monster things that Jack drew so well.
“…that Jack drew so well.” Lieber is reading word-for-word from Lee’s playbook, minimizing Kirby’s input. “Jack” didn’t just “draw so well.” He plotted, pencilled the story he saw in his head, and scripted it, all before Lee “invented” that story’s plot for Lieber’s benefit.
Lieber’s Deposition
Q[Randi Singer]. And did all of the ideas for stories come from Stan Lee or was there any other way you would get ideas?
A[Lawrence Lieber]. No, they all came from Stan Lee.
Q. Did you ever work on — did you ever get artwork that you would then write the dialogue for, or did you always write the script first?
[…]
A. I always wrote the script.
Q. Who came up with the ideas for the characters that would be in the story?
A. Stan. Well, wait a minute. You say the characters?
Q. Yes.
A. Stan. Yes. Yes. Stan, yes. Yes, sure.
Under oath, Lieber probably should have prefaced this statement with “to the best of my knowledge.” After Lee’s death, Lieber admitted to Riesman that actually he’d had no way of knowing: I ask Larry whether Kirby came up with the initial stories without any input from Stan; he replies, “Maybe he did. See, I was never there when the two of them were there.”
Q. You mentioned that Stan would give you the synopsis or the plot. How? How would he give that to you? Would he —
A. As far as I remember, it was — you mean written. He would give it written to me.
Q. And then after you did the assignment and you — what would happen? Then you would bring it to the office?
A. I would grow to the office with it. Yeah, I would bring it to the office.
Q. And what would happen next?
A. He would go over it and, as I said, if it were in the early years, he might correct or change a line or two. But he always used it. He, he — I never had to, you know, go home and do it again. He was very easy, he was showing me. He said, “Oh, you could have said this. You could have done that,” and he’d make some little corrections. And as time went on, he had fewer to make.
Q. Do you know what would happen to the script after Stan went over it and made whatever changes?
A. Yeah. It would be sent to the artist, I would guess.
Q. Okay.
A. Whether it was, you know, the various artists, yeah.
Q. Did you ever — did you have any contact with the story after you turned it in and made whatever changes?
A. No.
Q. Did you ever have discussions with artists about the stories or the scripts?
A. No.
Under oath, Lieber admits that he had no way of knowing which “artist” would receive his script, that he had no contact with that artist, and that he had no further “contact” with the story. His only interaction was with Lee, who was his only source of information regarding dealings with the other freelancers.
Q. Do you know the story behind the creation of Thor?
A. No.
Q. Do you know who came up with the idea for Thor?
A. No.
Q. Did you ever work on the comic Thor?
A. Yes.
Q. What was your involvement?
A. I got the synopsis, the plot from Stan, and I wrote the first script of Thor. That was it.
Q. And when you say “the script,” that’s what we were talking about before that told panel by panel?
A. Panel by panel and description of it, yes.
Q. Did you see any artwork on Thor before you wrote the script?
A. I don’t recall seeing any. I don’t know.
Q. Do you know who, after you turned in the script, do you know who the artist was that drew Thor?
A. I believe it was Jack Kirby.
Q. Did you have any conversations or any interactions with Jack Kirby about the Thor book?
A. No, not that I recall.
Lieber admits he was in no position to know if or when any his scripts entered the production pipeline.
What did Larry Lieber write?
Kirby’s monster stories
As has been shown in other entries on this blog, Lee plotted stories rarely, if ever. None of Kirby’s monster stories were signed by Lee or plotted by Lee, therefore Lieber never received a Lee plot or synopsis before Kirby drew the story. Therefore, according to Lieber’s own rules, he never actually provided Kirby with a full script in advance. Nearly every page of original art known to still exist has Kirby’s pencilled lettering in the balloons and captions, indicating that Kirby scripted a given story before Lieber would have even heard of it.
The only way Lee did plot for Kirby, sidestepping Lieber’s participation altogether, was by handing over a previously-published story with instructions to reproduce it. He is known to have done this with Kirby, Ditko, Heck, and Reinman. The jury is out on who wrote the original script in each case, but Lee was paid for “writing” each subsequent iteration he signed for no additional work.
Kirby’s last “monster” story was “I Accepted the Deadly Challenge of Zarkorr!” in Tales of Suspense #35, on sale 9 August 1962, the same date as Fantastic Four #8 and four weeks before the first Lieber (or Lee) credit. Did Lieber submit scripts to Lee after the fact for stories that Kirby had already plotted and scripted himself? Unknown, because no such scripts are known to exist. Kirby’s own scripts exist in abundance wherever there’s original art to be examined.
By Larry Lieber’s criteria, how many “monster” stories did he write full script for Kirby? Zero. How many did he dialogue afterwards using the Marvel Method? The original art and Lieber’s own account say zero to that as well. How much of the ever-growing stack of physical evidence justifies a present day blanket writing credit for Larry Lieber on Kirby’s “monster” stories? Zero.
Kirby’s early superhero work
Lee avoided signing the first three Thor stories and the first four Ant-Man stories, therefore they were plotted by Jack Kirby. This means Lieber scripted none of them for Kirby (although he might have been scripting them for practice), nor did he name Henry Pym or Donald Blake.
Steve Ditko commented in an essay that Marvel had the insect-based superhero market sewn up. This suggests that Goodman asked Kirby to change Henry Pym into one, timed to coincide with the introduction of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy and further refuting Lee’s Spider-Man creation nonsense. Lee avoided acknowledging Ant-Man until his financial desperation led to the creation of superimposed credits.
By the December cover date, Lee had clued in that he needed his name on everything Kirby was producing regardless of his distaste for the genre: teen humour and westerns would no longer support the lifestyle his wife had come to expect. Kirby had not only become Goodman’s strategist, but also the one he designated to execute the strategy. Rather than remain a spectator, Lee, presumably with Goodman’s blessing, began extracting the kickback that sustained him through the 1960s and launched his luxury car collection.
The Torch story bearing the first Lieber writing credit (Strange Tales #103) was not written full script, was not plotted by Lee, and was not dialogued by Lieber. It contains Kirby’s script in the balloons and captions with some pencilled alterations by Lee that were together turned verbatim into the published text by the letterer. According to the job number, “Prisoner of the 5th Dimension” was pencilled months ahead of its publication schedule. Its writing credits were added at the time of publication, and were completely fraudulent. Of Lieber’s ten actual SCRIPT credits on Kirby’s stories, this one didn’t involve a Lieber script.
The original art to Thor’s origin in Journey Into Mystery #83 was stolen early from Marvel, but the story lacked Lee’s signature and was clearly plotted by Kirby (and he didn’t work from a Lieber script). One of the last pieces of Kirby writing Marvel published before his death was his introduction to Monster Menace #2 (cover dated January 1994, on sale the previous November). In it he mentioned that he recycled his rock creatures from Tales to Astonish #16 as the villains in the Thor origin story. As with FF and The Hulk, Kirby incorporated a monster story into his new superhero book. Did Lieber dialogue the story after the fact? He insists he never just added dialogue, always working full script.
The second Ant-Man story was published the same month as Thor and Spider-Man were launched. Despite the lack of signatures or credits, it is falsely credited to Lee and Lieber by the GCD.
The origin of Ant-Man had come nine months earlier in a Kirby science fiction story, “The Man in the Anthill.” Like his other origin stories, it has its roots in his past work, in the case of a shrinking liquid, dating back to Blue Bolt in 1940. Its original art was recently sold by Heritage, but all that was posted of it on the auction site was the first-page splash. There is no Lee signature, therefore it was not plotted by Lee or scripted by Lieber. It was inked by Dick Ayers so somewhere on the page there will be evidence of a painted-over Kirby/Ayers signature.
With the Thor and Ant-Man stories, time will tell whether Kirby’s script (his pencilled lettering) matches the published lettering. It didn’t occur to Marvel to give either of the Liebers credit in print before 1973 when the enormity set in of a potential Kirby intellectual property claim. In 2017, Lieber began receiving full credit for scripting stories that had nothing to do with him. Lee’s own actions toward other people’s art in the 1960s have guaranteed that the evidence that counters his false narrative will continue to come to light.
In addition to the Kirby stories that contain an explicit Lieber credit, the GCD took the liberty of making that credit retroactive in Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish, and Journey Into Mystery back as far as the origins of the Torch, Ant-Man, and Thor, eight additional stories that bear no evidence whatsoever of Lee’s or Lieber’s involvement. They further extended Marvel’s blanket plotting and writing credits to Lee and Lieber on all of Kirby’s monster stories, but at least had the decency to add a question mark in those cases.
Art for the second Thor story, in Journey Into Mystery #84, has been spotted in the wild, and it shows it was written by Kirby with dialogue changes by Lee. The Kirby/Ayers signature was inadvertently left intact but there was no Lee signature: as with Ant-Man, Lee avoided the character until the implications of the move to superheroes set in. For Lieber to have been involved, Lee would have had to receive Kirby’s pages, generate a synopsis for Lieber, and wait for Lieber’s script. Whichever Lieber brother wrote the text that was ultimately used to overwrite Kirby’s pre-existing wording, it was considered inferior to Kirby’s in much of the story.
The advent of Lee’s credit line (Plot: Stan Lee; Script: Larry Lieber) initiated on some stories in titles with November or December 1962 cover date, appears to be the start of Lieber’s involvement. But was Lieber involved? His contribution to the Torch story that month has already been shown to be nil despite the SCRIPT credit added long after the fact. Kirby’s reaction (blowing up at Lee, witnessed by Lieber) tells us he objected to having another Lieber brother feeding at the trough for his efforts: when Lee’s wage transference grew to encompass Lieber, Kirby quit the titles where Lieber was being credited, and Lieber was removed, credit and all, from Kirby’s work after ten stories. His career writing or just going through the motions of writing for Kirby started and ended in those same three mystery titles, and finished with February’s cover date.
Lee finally decided to add his name to the fourth Thor story (Journey Into Mystery #86) in the form of the plot credit. Since Kirby’s pencilled lettering appears on the pages along with Lee’s (which entailed a number of dialogue changes), simple math tells us Lee’s modifications were made after the fact. Lieber’s only possible contribution was writing the dialogue that was added by Lee. Lieber insists he only worked full script, so again he has disqualified himself.
Iron Man
Lieber’s script credit on the first-published Iron Man story is false: he did not initiate the story with a full script based on Lee’s plot. Don Heck’s version of events credits Lee with conveying the plot over the phone, but the plot Heck wound up illustrating was Kirby’s. Heck was not working from a Lieber script, but from the plot relayed by Lee.
What was Lieber’s part? If he wrote a script in parallel to Heck illustrating the story by the Marvel Method, it also came from Kirby’s plot by way of Lee and wasn’t used by Heck to draw the story. The original art is at large, having been sold at Sotheby’s in 1996 (potentially from Lee’s massive ill-gotten hoard). The only secrets it could yield are whether Heck himself prompted any of the finished dialogue, or if Kirby’s layouts are present.
Conclusion
In Stuf Said, John Morrow called Jack Kirby’s interview statement, above, “egregious” and used it to draw a false equivalence between Kirby’s claims and Stan Lee’s career of lies. Yet it’s Kirby’s claims that prove more and more accurate as the evidence continues to come to light.
Kirby’s original art plight in the 1980s had captured people’s imagination, but when the truth he’d always told finally began receiving attention with the Comics Journal interview, it was time for Lee to fight back. He struck Kirby where it would hurt the most: his credibility. As Kenn Thomas wrote, “Jack Kirby’s honesty and integrity are not up for debate.”
Lee’s own credibility was unredeemable by that point, with his lies and his feigned lack of awareness acknowledged and laughed off by his followers. That changed in the 1990s when he succeeded in elevating his false narrative above Kirby’s credibility by having it voiced by his unassuming and “trustworthy’ younger brother. By 1999 Larry Lieber’s “impartial” third-hand observations had supplanted Kirby’s claim that “I always wrote my own stories,” and branded Kirby a liar.
The proposed justification for believing Lieber’s reinvented history is that he had no reason to lie. History shows, however, that he had every reason. Drawing the Spider-Man newspaper strip was a source of income for him for over 30 years prior to Lee’s death (as well as the Hulk strip for nearly four years). Lee was contractually paid $125,000 a year to delegate the Spider-Man strip, a privilege bestowed on Lieber and Thomas, among others, that could be taken away at his whim. Court documents show that threatening his livelihood was the mechanism Lee used to coerce Lieber to testify on Marvel’s behalf in the Kirby case. Is there any reason to believe that was the first time Lee used such a threat to exact Lieber’s cooperation?
Did Larry Lieber write scripts? Most assuredly, but at best those scripts were solely for Lee’s consumption. Did a script credit for Lieber entail Lee dictating Kirby plots to him, then using some of his dialogue? It’s plausible Lieber’s scripted words wound up on the page (his description of getting a plot and writing a script over the weekend would fit with Kirby turning in the pages of an early Thor story to Lee on a Friday). It was a rare occurrence, however, and stopped dead with February 1963’s cover date.
Why would Lee need Lieber to write dialogue? As anyone who has heard about the origins of the Marvel Method can tell you, he was too busy to write full scripts for all of his “artists” (no mention of the absence of evidence that Lee ever wrote a full script). But the only thing keeping Lee busy was loafing, and the Marvel Method owed its existence strictly to his determination to award himself the writing pay.
In 1962, once his Marvel Method kickback scheme was in place on two titles for Kirby and one for Ditko, Lee decided to ease off, share the dialoguing load, and take a slightly smaller “plotting” cut on the new characters (still for work that he wasn’t doing). Larry Lieber, Robert Bernstein, Don Rico and others (including uncounted anonymous ghostwriters in every decade) were added to the roster for the simple reason that Stan Lee was the lazy kind of wage thief.
Endnotes
Comics Scene article: In his 1995 article in Comics Scene #52, so intent was Will Murray on getting the scoop on the hidden years of Marvel history that he fell for Lee’s “Lieber wrote” narrative. It was just 11 years after his own investigative report (“I Remember… Vandoom,” Comics Collector #3, Spring 1984) that laid the inspiration for the monster stories at the feet of Kirby, infused with Romanian folk tales at the hands of his mother, and the scripting at Lee’s just because. The latter was also false, as Michael J Vassallo proved in 1999, the year Thomas’ Lieber interview was published. Vassallo showed that Lee didn’t sign a single one of Kirby’s sf/suspense/”giant monster” stories, ever, not in 1956-57 or from 1958 to 1962, when Kirby moved on to superheroes. Vassallo is willing to concede that Lieber may have added dialogue to these stories after the fact, but Lieber’s own testimony says that never happened.
“conversation”: In the heavily-scripted “interview” in Comic Book Artist, Thomas prompted Lee with the correct answers. He confirmed this by claiming of a later interview that Lee remembered something “unprompted,” as if that were the guarantee of authenticity. It foreshadowed Lee being prompted by his handlers nearly two decades later with the spelling of his name.
comprehensive interview: “A Conversation with Artist-Writer Larry Lieber,” Alter Ego Vol 3 #2, Fall 1999. Excerpted here.
further eight stories: After pencilling one science fiction story in 1956, the rest of Lieber’s 1950s credits were comprised of pencils on seven 1957 romance stories, with one in 1958. Was he writing these as well? The GCD, keen to give Lieber scripting credits on everything Kirby based solely on Lieber’s say-so, does not credit him with scripting any of his own romance stories. More information.
Michael J Vassallo: Marvel Method group, 18 August 2023.
in 1942: the Sandman story featuring Thor, Adventure Comics #75 for DC.
published in 2007: Interview conducted by Daniel Best, posted 6 August 2007.
Danny Fingeroth: Interview conducted in January 2008 for an article in Write Now! #18.
Lieber’s deposition: VIDEOTAPED DEPOSITION OF LAWRENCE LIEBER, New York, New York, 7 January 2011. Justia, Dockets & Filings, Second Circuit, New York, New York Southern District Court, Marvel Worldwide, Inc. et al v. Kirby et al, Filing 102, Exhibit E.
Lieber admitted to Riesman: True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, p 98.
previously-published story: Examples of this practice of Lee’s are detailed in the GCD entry for the Kirby and Ditko stories in Strange Worlds #1 (the first published for each, post-implosion). Two versions of the same story Kirby drew in “Flying Saucers” had been signed by Lee in 1953, drawn by Fred Kida and Gil Evans. He did not sign Kirby’s, possibly because he was leery of a blow up like the one that finally came in 1962. The story got subsequent remakes at the hands of Ditko and Heck. In the same issue, “Abominable Snowman” by Ditko and “Last Man on Earth” by Heck, neither signed by Lee, would also be covered multiple times by others; the two stories might have Timely or Atlas antecedents also not signed by Lee.
In another occurrence of Lee’s recycling, Kirby redrew his Rawhide Kid origin from scratch for Rawhide Kid #23 using his own script from #17. Both Lee and Kirby were paid again for the story: Kirby did the work twice for the pencilling page rate; Lee was paid as writer both times without writing a word other than “Stan” and “Lee.”
Don Heck’s version: He just called me up and told me he was going to have this character, Iron Man, and he said “Tony Stark,” and the way he wound up where he was over in I guess it would be considered Vietnam. And he’d pitch this synopsis over the phone. We didn’t actually sit down and work out the characters. —Heck to Will Murray, Comics Scene #37, September 1993.
HOWELL: Were you in on the creation of those characters?
HECK: Oh, yeah. I did the first [Iron Man] story, remember–although the costume on Iron Man was Jack Kirby’s… Then Stan calls me up and says, “You’re doing a character called Iron Man.”
HOWELL: yeah, “…and we need a story.”
HECK: That’s about it.
—Heck to Richard Howell and Carol Kalish, Comics Feature #21, November 1982.
Iron Man layouts: A controversy entirely manufactured by Mark Evanier who interviewed both men, declared yes and then no to layouts, and then blamed Kirby for the confusion.
Kenn Thomas: Kirby-L, the Jack Kirby mailing list, 5 September 2009.
Thanks to Patrick Ford and Ferran Delgado for the enhanced Thor panels.
For more information, see my books on Lulu.com. Kirby at Marvel is also available at Amazon.
accordingtokirby 