The Earl Wells article “Once and for all, who was the author of Marvel?” appeared in the “Stan the Man” section of The Comics Journal #181 (October 1995), the one with the exquisite Stan Lee-as-carnival-barker cover by Drew Friedman. In the article, Wells purports to prove Lee was the primary author of Marvel in the 1960s. R.C. Harvey wrote a rebuttal to it a few years later, and Wells edited the article to be reprinted in 2002’s The Comics Journal Library, Volume One: Jack Kirby.
In the article, Wells hits on Kirby’s Fourth World books as the antithesis of ’60s Marvel.
The most significant hero in this series was called Orion, and there had never been anything at all like him in Marvel comics.
…the story was called “The Death-Wish of Terrible Turpin,” a kind of irony that was completely alien to Marvel.
In other words, Kirby’s solo work was distinguished by its darker, more mature qualities.
The style of the various “New Gods” comic books was certainly different — the dialogue was not as smooth, the humor not as funny, nor the characterizations as consistently well-drawn as in the Marvel stories.
Here Wells gives away his age, because his characterization of Kirby’s writing and humour is strictly from the perspective of someone who believed the juvenile versions peddled by Lee were the ultimate in comics. Lee’s idea of humour mocked his and his readers’ participation in comics, a medium he believed was beneath him. Doug Harvey contrasts Kirby’s approach: “Kirby’s writing… is not humorous in the knowing ‘camp’ way that typified so much of comic writing in the wake of his early sixties work (and its translation into TV dialogue on Batman). Instead, Kirby’s writing is riddled with the kind of rollicking unconditional humor that animates the work of Charlie Chaplin or Ornette Coleman: lyrical, sentimental, and revolutionary…”
Lee’s dialogue talked down to what he perceived to be the level of his readers, often while trying to make sense of Kirby’s stories himself; it has aged badly. Kirby had faith in his audience, and his solo work stands beside the best science fiction of any period.
It is becoming clearer now how Kirby viewed the Marvel mythology. I think we can bring his view into sharp focus by considering one of the distinguishing features of the Marvel comics of the 1960s: the death scene. Just one example, drawn by Kirby and credited to Lee as writer, is “Death of a Hero!” which portrays the death of Franklin Storm, the father of two of the team’s members. These are not the kind of scenes that could be added by a dialogue writer to a story that had already been plotted and drawn without them. They were integral parts of the stories and logical culminations of the Marvel theme of heroic sacrifice: when heroes make the ultimate sacrifice, ambivalence and irony are replaced by certainty and honor. The death scenes must have sprung from the heart and mind of the real author of Marvel.
Wells might be dismayed to learn of the existence of documentary evidence attributing the initiation of the Franklin Storm storyline to Kirby. An unused pencil page surfaced, replete with Kirby’s margin notes. (The page was likely dropped from the book because Martin Goodman reduced the page count to 21 pages at the time the issue was published.) In addition, Sue and Johnny’s father wasn’t the virtuous one-dimensional character Wells attributes to Lee: Kirby’s extra page showed him swindling a wealthy widow, caught in the act by his invisible daughter.
In his updated TCJ Library version of the article, Wells adds examples.
Other examples abound throughout the 1960s in Marvel comics credited to Lee as scripter; they are not limited to stories drawn by Kirby. Here are a just a few: The death of the Gargoyle in The Incredible Hulk #1 (May 1962), drawn by Kirby; the death of Betty Brant’s brother in The Amazing Spider-Man #11 (April 1964), drawn by Steve Ditko; the death of Wonder Man in The Avengers #9 (Oct. 1964), drawn by Don Heck; the death of an envious scientist in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966), drawn by Kirby; and the death of Al Harper in The Silver Surfer #5 (April 1969), drawn by John Buscema.
In his essay, “How Stan Lee Took Credit for ‘This Man… This Monster!’,” Chris Tolworthy addresses the point Wells is making.
TOLWORTHY: The [Wells] essay argues that Kirby did not do “noble death” stories but Lee loved them. Therefore (it argues) this is a sign of Lee’s input.
The idea that Lee added the ending is “special pleading”: that is, all the evidence says Lee did NOT plot, but we say “in this one case he must have done (because the plot point is bad)”. I will now remind readers why the default position must be why Lee did not plot this issue, and then show why the “bad ending” argument fails.
As we have shown time and again in the Marvel Method group, all the evidence points to Lee having MINIMAL control over the plot of the stories. He might say “Bring back Dr Doom” or “lighten up the tone” or “have them fight Spider-Man” but that’s about it. Normally the story conferences take place behind closed doors, but when we do catch a glimpse they always show that Lee had literally no idea what was in the comic until he saw it. This is nowhere more clear than around issue 51.
“This Man… This Monster!” refers not just to Ben, not just to the unnamed scientist, but since issue one it has also referred to Reed. There are three men-monsters in this story, in different trajectories, so we can compare and contrast.
Lee’s editing always made Reed one dimensional. We therefore lose the central conflict of the story: the question of whether Reed should have done this, and whether the price was worth it: the price always paid by his friend. We still get a hint that this story is about Reed: the central tragedy on which the plot hinges is that Reed cannot even recognise his best friend. But most readers will not pick up on the importance of that, because Lee spent the past 50 issues telling everyone that Reed has no faults.
Wells gets to the crux of his argument.
WELLS: It is difficult for me to believe that the same man, an adult professional with years of experience, over the course of only five or so years, could have written with such deep feeling about two such widely divergent themes, on the one hand that great power requires responsibility, sacrifice, and suffering, and on the other that great power is so dangerous that even a philosophy of responsibility, suffering, and sacrifice, can be twisted into an obsession with death, and made to serve ant-life. …if there was one man who was more responsible than any of the others for the personal philosophy displayed in the Marvel comics of the early 1960s, the freshness, humor, and pathos, and things that made them different from anything else being published, that man was Stan Lee.
Tolworthy takes issue with the claim of Lee’s authorship:
TOLWORTHY: The unnamed scientist does not make a noble sacrifice: he simply pays the price for his own crime (of letting the rope break instead of saving Reed). His role is important, to show that inside people can be decent. But it is something ANYBODY should do. His role is to be an everyman: he struggles, he follows the tide of history, he has bad inside him, but also good. He is a human being, nothing more or less.
In summary, it seems to me that Kirby plotted the whole of FF51, just as he plotted everything else. And Lee edited the dialogue to make the hero one dimensional, just as he always did.
Read Tolworthy’s essay here.
Wells attempts to make the case that Kirby’s 1990 interview claims were exaggerated but understandable, attributable to a growing rage at his treatment at the hands of Marvel.
Kirby’s frustration must have intensified beyond endurance as a result of the mean-spirited and small-minded way that Marvel treated him during the late 1980s on the issue of whether Kirby was entitled to the return of his original artwork. Kirby’s vehemence in defending his important creative role in the history of Marvel Comics, to the point of claiming authorship, is understandable in the face of what must have appeared to Kirby as a deliberate campaign to deny him his due in every sense.
Wells is mistaken that a growing sense of rage led to more extravagant claims. Kirby’s account remained consistent throughout his interview record, from 1968 until his death in 1994. It was Stan Lee’s story that changed by leaps and bounds.
More on the Wells article here.
Robert C. Harvey‘s rebuttal to the Wells article came in the January 1998 issue of The Jack Kirby Collector (#18). This was my own entry point into the discussion, and Harvey’s obvious love for Boys’ Ranch and “Mother Delilah” compelled me to track down a copy of The Art of the Comic Book. Harvey had his own entry in the Kirby volume of the TCJ Library, his retrospective of Kirby’s career reprinted from The Comics Journal #167.
Here are some thoughts on the rebuttal.
Wells examines Jack Kirby’s work on the New Gods series at DC in the early 1970s and compares it to the work he did while at Marvel in the 1960s. So far, Wells is on solid ground. Then he loses his footing; noting that the spirit of the New Gods books is antithetical to the spirit that animates the Marvel books of the previous decade…
…there is ample evidence to support the notion that Kirby viewed heroism differently at different times in his career. In the common parlance of literary criticism, this sort of change is called “growth.”
There is a lot of solid ground/lost footing in various attempts to catalogue the individual contributions at Marvel in the ’60s, so I’ll steal the comparison. So far Harvey is on solid ground, but he then he loses his footing attributing Kirby’s work to Lee.
It’s pretty clear from the testimony quoted in Wells’ article and in other places in the same issue of the Journal that Lee ginned up plot ideas and that Kirby accepted some of them and rejected others as he fleshed out the ideas that Lee rained down upon his head. Overhearing a story-development session from the back seat of a car, John Romita reports…
The pages of art that Kirby turned in transformed Lee’s story ideas into dramatic action; and Lee embellished the action with his verbiage, writing captions and speech balloons that gave the stories a self-deprecating patina.
Lee didn’t “rain down” ideas on Kirby. His ideas when working with Kirby all came after Kirby’s pages, and when they rained down on the pages they often changed what Kirby had submitted.
Romita did not witness a “story-development” session, he was Lee’s chosen audience for a show that was designed to indoctrinate him for the purpose of spreading Lee’s propaganda. (Romita’s concept of Lee’s working methods first came in handy during his 1966 interview in the fanzine Web Spinner: based on no experience of his own he helpfully badmouthed the recently-departed Steve Ditko as “difficult” for Lee to work with.) Steve Sherman had it on good authority (Kirby’s): “According to Jack, they did not have weekly meetings on story.”
Harvey then makes a point that Wells does not.
Kirby was as fond of his audience as he was of drawing and storytelling. Any comic book reader who spent any time with him can testify to that. And Marvel’s success with the college crowd (slightly older readers than he’d been working for prior to that time) doubtless made Kirby more aware of the blighting impact of Vietnam on American youth than he had been before during either of the other conflicts he’d witnessed. His readers were being marched off to a war they despised for reasons that seemed wholly irrelevant. Kirby could scarcely have ignored what was going on around him – and around his readers.
Jack Kirby genuinely cared for his readers. When Stan Lee addressed what he perceived as an adult audience (in his Oui interview and Quest article) he expressed contempt for the “drooling juveniles and semicretins” who comprised his young readership, characterizing them as something to be manipulated. The constant theme through all versions of his fictitious biography is the struggle to escape the field to which the efforts of his cousin-in-law and his own lack of ambition had permanently consigned him.
So how did Kirby get from the Marvel ambiance to the New Gods ambiance? The latter shows that Kirby, once a believer in the redemptive and triumphant power of heroism, had lost his faith -or, rather, had tempered it with an almost cynical realism. He did what all of us did as we progressed from World War II through the Korean War to Vietnam.
Kirby’s entire career can be seen as a progression. I’ve indicated some of that progression here; in my book, I indicate other aspects of it. For now, however, it is perhaps enough to say that if we view the creative artist as a growing, developing consciousness, we can easily explain what Wells finds so inexplicable: The conflicting views of heroism and human nature found in the Marvel Universe and in the New Gods universe.
What Wells and Harvey both miss is that Kirby was the initial writer of these books, and Lee had the final say through dialogue. This is the great insight we get from the very existence of thousands of pages of Kirby’s pencilled margin notes.
In his essay “Fantastic Fascism?” (International Journal of Comic Art Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2003), Craig Fischer takes on accusations of fascism in Jack Kirby’s work from Art Spiegelman and Klaus Theweleit. Spiegelman is sadly entitled to his opinion of Kirby, and I’m grateful for anyone who will take him to task for it.
Fischer’s solid ground is his use of Kirby’s Fourth World to refute the fascism charge.
At the heart of such unresolved questions is the work of Jack Kirby, the most prolific and influential artist in the history of American mainstream comic books… The facts of Kirby’s own life are an heroic refutation of fascism; as Jerry Boyd points out, “Kirby had been a soldier in WWU serving in General George Patton’s Third Army which became world-renowned for its crushing breakthroughs on the German defenses after D-Day. Like any other infantryman, he witnessed firsthand the horrors of war, and had seen or learned afterwards the terrors the S.S. had kept hidden; The extermination camps” (Boyd, 1998:5). Boyd further argues that Kirby’s portrayal of Apokolips in the “Fourth World” comics is a thinly-veiled fictionalization of the evils of Nazi Germany, with Hitler morphing into Kirby’s arch-villain Darkseid. Although Boyd sees a consistent anti-Nazi stance in both the man and the artist, others discern fascism in Kirby’s superhero comics… Spiegelman clearly sees Fascist tendencies in Kirby’s art, then, while Theweleit only obliquely hints at connections between Kirby’s treatment of mythic heroism and the Fascist Zeitgeist.
While describing the difference between disparate takes on Doctor Doom’s motivation by Kirby and Lee, Fischer invokes Mike Gartland.
According to Mazzucchelli [David, in his TCJ interview], Lee’s dialogue posits that Doom is ultimately corrupted by a catastrophic accident, while Kirby attributes Doom’s evil to a little scratch. Misunderstandings like this between Lee and Kirby were common; Mike Gartland, in his “Failure to Communicate” columns in The Jack Kirby Collector, charts in scholarly detail the disjunctions between Kirby’s. drawings — and the written suggestions he would write in the margins of his pencilled pages — and the captions and word balloons Lee would add after Kirby laid out the visual narrative.’
Gartland did comics scholarship a great service, bringing Kirby’s margin notes to public attention and highlighting Lee’s departures from the story told by the pages as he received them. Gartland has since made it clear that despite the evidence he amassed of Lee’s meddling, he declines to make a value judgment on Lee’s “contribution” and considers the Kirby-Lee product superior to Kirby’s solo endeavours. Hopefully the end to his series came by his choice, not as a result of being shouted down by the dominant Kirby-Lee contingent of TwoMorrows’ readership.
Fischer finds his shaky ground when he introduces the Fantastic Four to the argument.
The Freikorps soldiers wrote memoirs where their nameless wives were mentioned for maybe a sentence or two, while in their 102-issue run on The Fantastic Four, Kirby and Stan Lee devoted more time to domestic matters (the courtship, wedding and marriage of Reed and Sue Richards, the birth of their son Franklin) than any other superhero creators before. or since. Of course, Lee and Kirby’s treatment of the Reed-Sue relationship was often embarrassingly reliant on gender stereotypes, with Sue fretting about “girlie” concerns while Reed works on one of his massive machines… Yet the very fact that Lee and Kirby give Sue a voice — albeit a “feminine,” weak voice — within the pages of the Fantastic Four is an acknowledgment of female subjectivity that was never possible in the memoirs and stories of the Freikorps.
Fischer missed it, and even Gartland, with all the evidence in front of him, never addressed Lee’s sexism. Kate Willaert created a blog out of the blatant examples. Here’s another passage from Chris Tolworthy’s FF 51 analysis:
TOLWORTHY: The simplest way to see Lee’s edits is to read the stories without dialogue. The “Kirby Without Words” blog shows that the art and dialogue are frequently in conflict.
The clearest and most common conflict is sexism (check the blog for examples). Lee always wanted the male hero to be THE MALE HERO. So:
- When a woman did something, Lee changed the dialogue to give credit to the man.
- When the male hero was controlled by a villain, Lee changed the dialogue so the male hero was NOT being controlled.
- When the male hero did something morally ambiguous (especially if it might offend the Comics Code) Lee changed the dialogue to make it safer.
The number one example is Reed Richards, Mr Fantastic. By editing out his moral conflicts, Lee removed the heart and soul of the Fantastic Four.
Daniel Greenberg and others have provided many examples in the Marvel Method group of Lee abdicating his moral leadership, which his young charges seem to hold out as one of his most endearing qualities. Tom Scioli recently used an example in his YouTube read-through of Thor #139; it had been highlighted by Patrick Ford in May of last year.
FORD: Even in Lee’s dialogue Thor is going to die. In Kirby’s version Thor is crying because daddy took away his hot rod and Sif is disgusted because Thor is acting like a big baby. What Lee did was turn it into some kind of noble self sacrifice with Sif blaming mean old Odin.
The idea that in the ’60s the public had no stomach for a strong women character is ridiculous. There are many old films, TV shows, books, etc. with strong women characters which were and remain popular. Lee had some weird issue with women. It’s very obvious.
Lee’s sexism is excused as being of its time. That would likely be the end of the discussion if it hadn’t been Jack Kirby’s accomplishments Lee chose to erase; instead, Lee’s behaviour gets to be held to a higher standard. Recent Marvel Method posts show positive portrayals in Kirby’s 1950s work of young women in STEM, and the female member of a team saving the day (as Kirby was often derailed trying to do with Sue Storm).
The Kirby-Lee dichotomy on female characters can be reduced to their views on their life partners. Kirby saw Roz as his powerful equal, and the inspiration for the character of Barda; Lee used his wife and daughter’s insatiable spending habits as an excuse for a life of wage and credit theft.
Fischer returns the discussion to solid footing again with Kirby’s solo work.
FISCHER: And this female voice grows stronger in Kirby’s Fourth World comics. Although Spiegelman claims that Kirby’s work is a “celebration of the physicality of the human body at the expense of the intellect,” a comic like Mister Miracle strikes a balance between physicality and intellect. Mister Miracle has two central characters, escape artist Scott Free (who represents intelligence and resourcefulness) and Big Barda (who, surprisingly for a superheroine, represents athleticism and physical power), and Kirby brings body and mind together as Scott and Barda fall in love, get married, and thrive in a relationship based on equal participation in the struggle against Darkseid.
In his footnotes, Fischer cites the Wells essay as “another fine reading of ‘The Glory Boat!'”
WELLS: But this seems to be a very negative world-view from the man who helped breathe life into Captain America. Kirby is by nature an optimist, powerfully drawn to expressions of life affirmation. And I think there is a bright glimpse of hope among the fatalistic gloom, in a scene from one of Kirby’s best stories, “The Glory Boat.”
Kirby is not the author of Marvel…
On a closer reading, this might be the only flaw in Wells’ argument. Kirby is the author of the Marvel stories in their initial form, as they were intended. Lee can be designated the author of the final product, though he achieved that distinction by dismantling the well-constructed stories that were handed to him. He was the great differentiator of the Marvel work from Kirby’s Fourth World.
…but [Kirby] is the author of a body of work that in many ways is equally impressive… Indeed, far from being finished, Kirby’s story of the superhero as portrayed in the New Gods stories — a sometimes crudely fashioned but also richly imaginative, bitterly ironic, usually profound, and doom-haunted creative ore that was veined with the gold of a vision of ultimate transcendence — will always seem to be just beginning. Perhaps that is because his stories reflect the ultimate and happiest irony, that life must be an unending process of change, of new beginnings, if what we most cherish is to survive.
While reading the lengthy passages about the Fourth World books, it becomes apparent that the Wells article contains a thorough and detailed appreciation of the series by someone who understood and enjoyed it. In comparison, the juvenile, superficial, unsupported statements in favour of Lee’s “writing” superiority suggest a more devious approach. It’s as though Earl Wells himself wrote his article in two voices: shallow versus deep, flippant versus profound, Lee’s voice compared with Kirby’s. In this sense, he has the difference nailed.
R.C. Harvey saw Jack Kirby’s career from a broad perspective stretching back to the origins of the medium, but the other articles cited here (and comics scholarship in general) have a superhero fixation. Kirby knew that superheroes would have their time, and that they were back in season in 1958. Stan Lee’s only evident decade of creative success came while his ghostwriters and ghost-creators were Kirby, Ditko, and Wood, a decade that also saw superhero fanatic Roy Thomas being added to the Marvel roster. These two things combined to ensure that the season would never end: superheroes are forever, long after having outlived their usefulness. In 1970, Kirby shook their dust off his feet and returned to his science fiction roots before again branching out into his other preferred genres of mystery, romance, and adventure.
For a further look at how the evidence confirms Kirby’s account, check out, According to Jack Kirby and Kirby at Marvel, here. Kirby at Marvel is also available at Amazon.
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