Comics have had a history problem. Many books that touch on Marvel in the 1960s begin and end with the company version that was developed after Jack Kirby’s 1970 departure. The motivation behind an alternate history was the company’s need to preempt any intellectual property claims on Kirby’s part: he’d operated throughout the ’60s without a contract, and the incoming owners were rightly concerned. The revisionism meshed well with Stan Lee’s portrayal of his Marvel Method as an innovation in comics production, rather than the vehicle for his appropriation of other people’s writing pay, and in 1974 the first installment of the Official Version was published under his name as Origins of Marvel Comics. Compounding the situation, with the passing of labourers and fans of the Golden Age, there’s an increasing belief that comics history begins with Stan Lee creating the Fantastic Four.
The antidote to Marvel’s rewriting of history is the accounts of the freelancers: the writings of Steve Ditko and Wallace Wood, and Jack Kirby’s interviews. Tom Scioli’s Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics starts, not with the inception of the FF, but more than half a century earlier, with the inception of their real creator. Scioli employs a little-seen approach to Kirby’s story: he starts with Kirby’s interviews and treats them as the historical record. In addition to Gary Groth’s 1989 interview in The Comics Journal, he incorporates the 1985 Leonard Pitts, Jr interview, featuring Kirby’s invocation of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? In Scioli’s telling, Jack Kirby is taken at his word, as he should be.
I wouldn’t have chosen the graphic novel format for a Kirby reference book, but Scioli’s book and James Romberger’s For Real have won me over. This is a book that will bring Kirby’s epic life story to a wider audience.
Jack Kirby is a deeply researched labour of love. Scioli’s careful approach is evident in his portrayal of Kirby’s career-derailing confrontation with Jack Schiff, giving voice to Kirby’s words from his court testimony. Schiff’s intentions are obvious when the scene is acted out, but equally obvious is why the judge wasn’t convinced when Kirby expressed those words on the stand. His sense of betrayal when Jack Liebowitz testified against him is palpable.
One weak spot is the Simon and Kirby years, where a dearth of Kirby interview material, or any other supporting accounts, forces Scioli to rely on Joe Simon’s The Comic Book Makers. Kirby himself was reluctant to talk about his time with the famously litigious Simon, other than a somewhat revealing interview with James Van Hise. 1 When Simon’s book came out in 1990, Roz Kirby asked that it be kept from her husband because it would upset him; it has the same passing relationship with the facts as Lee’s Origins. Many details from Simon’s stories, already considered sacrosanct, need to be rigorously fact-checked: these include the circumstances surrounding the team’s departure from Timely, and Kirby’s alleged grudge against the teen-aged Lee for ratting them out (something Kirby never mentioned). Since Simon wasn’t present, his accounts of Kirby’s conversations with Goodman in the ‘60s could only have been imagined.
A technical point: Simon is listed as the inker of Kirby’s stories in Young Romance #1 (and the Kirby Checklist has the same error). With some exceptions of Simon inks that really stand out, Kirby was frequently his own inker until the late ‘50s. Scioli does make a point of showing Kirby in charge creatively throughout the S&K period.
Jack Kirby saw himself as primarily a writer, and from that perspective the physical effects of aging that caused him to reinvent his drawing style had no effect on the grandeur of his writing; the word decline could no more be used to describe Kirby’s later works than it could Picasso’s or Kubrick’s. Fandom’s dinosaurs, Mark Evanier and Charles Hatfield among them, hold that only fanatics can love Kirby’s later efforts. Scioli represents a different generation of Kirby readers, and his enthusiasm for the ‘80s material has always been infectious.
Appropriately, the book features a number of familiar scenes showing the recognition Kirby received in his later years. His death is marked by a solid black panel with a small date in the corner, followed by three pages of half-height panels highlighting assorted posthumous events, speeches, and screen credits. Stan Lee is perfectly summed up, without comment, in just three of these panels.
Tom and I joined the Jack Kirby internet mailing list around the same time two decades ago, and at that time, news of the Official Kirby Biography was already a few years old. If that book does someday come to fruition, it will be encumbered in various ways by the Official Company History (if not designed to dovetail with it). Tom Scioli started with a clean slate and produced a Kirby biography with everything I had hoped for. I’m thrilled that he got there first.
Footnotes
back1 “Jack Kirby in the Golden Age,” Jack Kirby interviewed by James Van Hise, The Jack Kirby Collector #25, August 1999.
Jack Kirby conveyed volumes with just the posture or facial expression of a character. For a few months in late 1971 and early 1972, his faces exhibited exquisite detail, and Mike Royer’s faithful inks permitted us to see the intricacy of Kirby’s linework.
There is a myth that an abundance of ’60s margin notes signaled an increase in Kirby’s plotting involvement. A similar misconception is that in the early Fourth World books, Kirby was just throwing characters and concepts at the wall, and finally settled in just as Royer got involved. On the contrary, Kirby was playing the long game, and the early issues of the four titles show seeds of things that wouldn’t burst into full flower for a year or more. Before attributing any shortcomings in the books to Kirby, it needs to be acknowledged that his artistic efforts lay concealed under Vince Colletta’s inks. In fact, in the years since Kirby inked his own pencils in the ’50s, very few of the inkers assigned to his work were friendly to his penciled faces, not even Joe Sinnott.
For roughly eight months, Kirby was on top of the world. Aside from the ongoing issues with Jimmy Olsen, he was in complete control of his output in a way that he hadn’t been since the fall of Mainline, and it showed in his work. In the examples that follow, it’s particularly clear in the hair and the eyes.
Mike Royer gets acquainted with the pencils: New Gods #5 and Mister Miracle #5.
Forever People #6, New Gods #6, and Jimmy Olsen #146.
The second issues of the black and white magazines, In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World.
Kirby Draws Real People.
Kirby Draws Real People Again.
Funky Flashman and Murder, Inc. were done during the same two-month cycle. I’m in no way suggesting that Kirby drawing real-life criminals inspired the content of Mister Miracle #6.
The epic achieves biblical proportions with Forever People #7 and New Gods #7..
Scott and Barda return to Apokolips in Mister Miracle #7.
In Jimmy Olsen, Scrapper and Gabby achieve their own unique detailed style.
“The Power,” Forever People #8.
“The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin,” New Gods #8.
Kanto the Assassin debuted in Mister Miracle #7, but the book was strictly action. Kanto didn’t get his close-up until the following issue.
James Romberger: Kirby’s drawing was based on observation and feeling. Later he became a bit more simplified or one might say he began to almost parody his own style, but a lot of that developed in reaction to the inkers imposed on him. But there is a major rift and drop in the early-mid 70s and I think this came about because he was fucked so terribly—for a few years he had a hard time with it because he had been struck down at a peak of power and grace by the idiot Carmine Infantino at DC cancelling his Fourth World.
To my eye, Jack Kirby’s style experienced a reinvention before the Fourth World books were cancelled. The black and white magazine work came to an end, followed by the eighth issues of the trilogy: by production number, the sequence was Forever People 8, New Gods 8, Jimmy Olsen 148 (the last), Demon 1, Mister Miracle 8, Forever People 9, Demon 2, Kamandi 1, Mister Miracle 10, New Gods 9, Mister Miracle 9. By publication order, the final issue of Jimmy Olsen came first, followed by the eighth and ninth issues of the trilogy titles. The Demon and Kamandi were rolled out during the tenth issue cycle.
As can be seen in the examples above, Kirby was inspired and invested in all of his projects up to this point. Forever People #9, however, was both the cause and beneficiary of his new style. “The Monster in the Morgue” bears Carmine Infantino’s bootprints: Kirby had been instructed to add Deadman, a character that was not his own; he was disheartened, to put it mildly. His make-up compelled him to deliver a good story regardless of the circumstances, but the intensity was gone. Kirby’s reinvented style was more simplified and less detailed: it was on full display in that book, in the new titles, and in “The Mister Miracle to Be” (Mister Miracle #10 and subsequent issues), as well as in the final two issues each of The Forever People and The New Gods.
The other two books in the Issue 9 cycle are interesting. “Himon” in Mister Miracle #9 was the story Kirby couldn’t not tell: he had led up to it with a series of backup stories in earlier issues, and there’s evidence the story was moved up in the schedule. Knowing the implications of Infantino’s intervention, Kirby saw the writing on the wall and got the book out. It has some magnificent panels (particularly on pages 16 and 21), but very few detailed faces (Willik, below, being one close-up). Some of the facial expressions are reduced to slashes.
Patrick Ford: There is a bit of a loss of enthusiasm at DC at the time of the cancellation of the Fourth World but in my opinion the material recovered pretty quickly and his stuff for Marvel is often brilliant.
The other casualty was Kirby’s new New Gods storyline, “The Bug,” a potential multi-parter about discrimination in the perfect society. The rooftop scenes featuring Orion, Lightray, and Eve Donner are executed with care while the bug scenes on New Genesis are all action. The final speech could be Kirby’s DC equivalent of the Silver Surfer #18 scream: perhaps this issue had been started when Infantino called with orders to insert Deadman into Forever People. In the following issue, the Bug subplot was simply left hanging.
After Eve’s speech (below), the detail in Kirby’s faces didn’t fully recover until he was reunited with Mike Royer at Marvel (after again having to mess around for nearly a year, sometimes more, with the wrong inkers).
What Jack Kirby left unfinished was the time of peace when he was left alone to do it his way.
In Mister Miracle #6, Kirby unleashed a brilliant send-up of Stan Lee called “Funky Flashman.” It was the most accurate and incisive portrait of Stan Lee ever, by a master caricaturist who knew the inside story. No one was ever better positioned or equipped to give Lee the treatment.
Roy Thomas, as a Marvel staffer, might have gotten to know Lee even better than Kirby did as a freelancer. Thomas didn’t arrive on the scene until 1965, however, and he never broke into the exclusive club of those who addressed Lee by his full given name.
In 1961, with the comics division on the brink of shutdown by Martin Goodman, Kirby presented a stack of concepts to Goodman and was given the green light for the Fantastic Four. Lee’s brother Larry Lieber said “When Stan saw that the strips had potential [ie when they were approved by Goodman], he started writing them.” 1
Kirby had a different take: Lee saw Kirby’s paycheque for the writing and penciling page rates on the “monster” stories, and Kirby was forced to “render unto Caesar.” 2 To achieve this, Lee first added his signature to stories that Kirby wrote. He then added fraudulent plot credits to Kirby stories for which writing credits were given to others (for example “Prisoner of the 5th Dimension!” in Strange Tales #103, Lee’s first “plot credit”). Lee then redefined “writer” for the Marvel Method as “the person who fills in the dialogue,” while at the same time redefining his actual writers as “artists.”
Kirby told Mark Hebert in 1969 that the early superhero work, when Lee inserted himself as Taker of the Writing Page Rate, “was a back-breaking job.” Kirby finally got some relief when he was given a page rate increase for pencilling in the mid ’60s. 3
Stan Taylor: I think that Stan’s singling out and praising the artists actually upset the artists, more than making them happy. Stan was quick to tell everyone how his artists not only pencilled, but plotted also, yet they knew they were only being paid for pencilling, and at a rate less than the competition, and getting nothing for plotting. Stan was getting all the glory, and the big bucks for simply putting the finishing sheen on the artists stories. If it was me, I would get pretty mad about doing the work of one and a half people, while being paid less than the competitor paid just for penciling, and then someone else takes the credit for my stories. 4
For the purposes of this assessment, I’ll use “Funky” and “Stan Lee” interchangeably.
Funky Flashman: “…the opportunistic spoiler without character or values…”
“…he lives… in the decaying ante-bellum grandeur of the Mockingbird Estates!” Martin Goodman built his publishing empire by mimicking, mockingbird-like, his competitors’ successes.
In the opening sequence, Funky is taking “bread” out of the mouth of a bust that resembles Kirby. Lee was at the mercy of the number of pages Kirby was writing, including layouts. When Kirby received a page rate increase in the mid ’60s, he reduced his output, and stopped doing layouts: Lee was deprived of the writing rate on the pages Kirby was no longer doing. Ditko had a similar effect on Lee’s income when he demanded and received plotting credit on Spider-Man: the plotting page rate was deducted from Lee’s writing rate.
Funky likes it when the Little People hear his words of inspiration, and Houseroy tells him what he wants to hear.
Houseroy plans to take over when Funky leaves.
Kirby examines Funky’s attitude toward the talent. Officially, the freelancers were interchangeable and expendable. In practice, Kirby provided Lee with something no other collaborator did: thousands of pages of writing pay.
Roy Thomas once remarked, “Stan is always ‘on’,” 5 meaning Stanley Lieber was always immersed in his Stan Lee persona… except when he wasn’t, occasionally leading to “shocking results.”
That shifty master of mobility, Funky Flashman, is a bit of a misogynist. Lee repeatedly gutted Kirby’s strong female characters to allow them to demonstrate traditional gender roles to an impressionable audience. Kirby portrays a typical Funky-female interaction.
This Kirby woman, like many of Kirby’s female characters based on his wife Roz, isn’t having it.
Funky is a classic: ego, ignorance, and hostility! A real powerhouse!
For panel after panel, Kirby gives us an intimate view of a Kirby-Lee story conference.
“I tell you, I tested that phrase on my man, Houseroy… and the beggar literally cried! But call me Funky, sir! I prithee! For what is a name… but the opening gun of mutual enterprise?!”
Folksy to a fault Funky in his “Uneasy Rider” outfit (and cleaning his ear).
Funky is enamored of recordings of his own voice. In the Pitts interview, 6 Kirby cited the night he found Lee speaking into a recording device as a catalyst for his decision to leave Marvel.
“Don’t paw me, Houseroy! I know my words drive people into a frenzy of adoration! I’m preparing for my establishment stage! When the press notices build to fever pitch, I’ll…”
Throwing Houseroy to the wolves.
Funky makes good his escape.
After causing the estate to go up in flames, Funky heads for Hollywood. Kirby injects another comment regarding the treatment of the talent at the family-run operation.
The colours present a Marvel of Contrast. Cyclopean black is a reference to Robert E. Howard’s short story, “The Black Stone” (Weird Tales, November 1931). 7
Scott is not ignorant of Funky’s devices.
Footnotes
back1 Larry Lieber in conversation with Roy Thomas, Alter Ego v3#2, 1999.
KIRBY: Of course it was fulfilling. It was a happy time of life. But. But, slowly management suddenly realized I was making money. I say “management,” but I mean an individual. I was making more money than he was, OK? It’s an individual. And so he says, “Well, you know…” And the old phrase is born. “Screw you. I get mine.” OK? And so I had to render to Caesar what he considered Caesar’s. And there was a man who never wrote a line in his life — he could hardly spell — you know, taking credit for the writing. I found myself coming up with new angles to keep afloat. I was in a bad spot. I was in a spot that I didn’t want to be in and yet I had to be to make a living.
Jack Kirby interviewed by Gary Groth, conducted in summer of 1989, The Comics Journal #134, February 1990.
back3 TCJ: How were you able to draw five strips at once during the “Marvel Age’?
KIRBY: I forced myself. It‘s not very easy, especially when you’re in a field that’s picking up momentum and there isn’t too much of a staff to take the burden off you.
TCJ: What do you mean, there wasn’t a staff?
KIRBY: There wasn‘t much of a staff. So I had all that to do and it was a back-breaking job. But, like I said, my generation adjusted to it.
TCJ: Is it smoother-going now?
KIRBY: Yes, it‘s eased off a bit. I’m grateful for that because I can read a newspaper occasionally.
TCJ: Would you like to do another strip, even after all that work?
KIRBY: If they‘re ready, I’m always ready. I never refused a job. I‘ve always been ready to do a job; that’s my bag. I’ll do a job for Stan. I’ll do a job for someone else. I’ll do a job for my family. It‘s the type of person I am. If I have a job to do, I‘ll do it. I‘ve got to do it.
Kirby interviewed by Mark Hebert, conducted early 1969. Appeared in The Nostalgia Journal #30, November 1976, and #31, December 1976.
back4 Stan Taylor, Kirby-L, the Jack Kirby Internet mailing list, 6 November 1999.
back5 Roy Thomas interviewed by Jim Amash, conducted by phone in September 1997, published in The Jack Kirby Collector #18, January 1998.
back6 PITTS: Why did you leave the F.F. and Marvel that first time?
KIRBY: Because I could see things changing and I could see that Stan Lee was going in directions that I couldn’t. I came in one night and there was Stan Lee talking into a recording machine, sitting in the dark there. It was strange to me and I felt that we were going in different directions.
Leonard Pitts, Jr., conducted in 1986 or 1987 for a book titled “Conversations With The Comic Book Creators”. Posted on The Kirby Effect: The Journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center.
back7What’s Cyclopean: For a prototypically pulp writer, Howard at first keeps his adjectives thoroughly under control. Probably not accidentally, the prose gets purpler in proximity to the monolith (“lurid tongues of flame,” etc.). And in the midsummer moonlight, the cliffs around it appear like “cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting from the mountain-slope.” Then later, the stone is “like a spire on a cyclopean black castle.” —review of “The Black Stone” by Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth.
In The Jack Kirby Collector 72, Shane Foley did an investigative report called “The Great Kirby Kontroversy Letters.” He set out to read all of the letters printed in Jack Kirby’s titles during his final years at Marvel, from 1975 to 1978.
Foley: More than once we’ve heard that Jack Kirby felt the letters pages in his ’70s Marvel books were stacked negatively against his work, with disparaging and critical comments being given greater voice than the positive, supportive ones. And there are certainly staffers from that period of time (Jim Shooter and Alan Kupperberg, for example, both interviewed online) who have publicly stated they felt Kirby was right in his suspicions. However, I must admit that, while I knew there were many negative and critical comments on those pages, I had never felt that they were overly so, or that the opinions printed there were entirely unfair.
At the end of the exercise he questions whether they were really so bad.
Foley: Could those negative letters comments—fewer in number than might be expected, but certainly harsh at times—really have had a significant impact in this area? Really?
A year and a half after John Morrow printed Foley’s article, he published Stuf’ Said. Throughout the book, Morrow adopted the language of deniability when referring to verifiable facts.
Morrow: On January 9, the New York Herald Tribune article appears, causing a major rift in the Kirby/Lee relationship. Stan Lee receives an angry phone call this morning from Jack’s wife Roz Kirby, livid about her husband’s portrayal in the article. Every little jab or slight, real or perceived, up to this point could’ve played a role in this reaction. –Stuf’ Said p63, 69(2e)
“Every little jab or slight, real or perceived…” is an extremely poor choice of words. Is it possible that Roz Kirby “perceived” that Stan Lee was signing his name to her husband’s work, or just “imagined” that Lee was stealing his pay? Morrow joins Roy Thomas in minimizing what was an impossible situation for the Kirbys.
Morrow: Kirby feels that there are staffers in the Marvel offices who have been intentionally trying to damage his work and reputation—due to professional jealousy, loyalty to Lee, or resentment over Kirby’s refusal to draw other writers’ scripts.–Stuf’ Said p126, 139(2e)
“Kirby feels”? Why is it necessary to add the qualification? It’s not just an impression Kirby had. Some other impressions, including Morrow’s, are below.
In Stan Lee: A Marvelous Life, Danny Fingeroth wrote: “There were rumors that staffers were deliberately printing a higher proportion of negative letters about Kirby’s titles than were actually received and were making fun of his output with nasty annotated pages of his comics pinned up on the office walls.”
“Rumors”? Besides Kirby himself, Stephen Bissette, John Morrow, and Mark Evanier have spread those “rumors” as first-hand experience.
In the midst of Marvel’s lawsuit against the Kirbys, Scott Edelman had something to get off his chest.
Edelman: I’d thought enough time had passed that I could forgive Jack Kirby. But I just learned I was wrong.
I was on staff at Marvel Comics in the mid-’70s when the King returned and tried to pick up where he’d left off. At the time, as I sat there in the Bullpen with my blue pencil and proofread the original art for some of his initial issues of titles such as Captain America, which he not only drew, but wrote and edited, I was horrified. The art could still be the stuff of dreams at times, but the words that came out of his characters’ mouths seemed more like a nightmare.
The buzz from us kids in the office wasn’t kind. I’ll admit it. Kirby was a god to us for what he did during the ’60s, but what he was doing at Marvel in the ’70s made us wince, and we didn’t have the tact or maturity to say it appropriately. So we acted like ungrateful punks. But now that the years have passed, as I read some of those issues of Captain America over again, I’m wincing still.
It would be interesting to know if Edelman was responding to blogposts by Jim Shooter the same year.
Shooter: Jack’s titles got plenty of positive mail, too, especially early on, but because the people putting together the lettercolumns then used a lot of negative letters, that had the effect of generating more negative letters. In those days, it was a very cool thing to see your letter in print. Show the readers that negative letters are likely to get printed and you’d get lots of them.
I cannot imagine what the people putting the letter columns together were thinking. Were they trying to be “fair and balanced,” and show that some people were disappointed with what Jack was doing? Was it that they, themselves, were disappointed with what Jack was doing and weighted the lettercols to express their POV? Putting together a negative lettercol is stupid, amateurish and/or malicious.
In an earlier post, Shooter blamed David Anthony Kraft, and wrote, “We fired Kraft and got someone else.” Kraft disputes this. 1
The year after admitting to “us kids in the office” being unkind to Kirby, and being “ungrateful punks,” Edelman got hostile with his detractors.
Edelman: Where are those letters columns designed to turn fans into a torch-bearing, pitchfork-wielding mob intent on storming the House of Ideas and demanding Kirby be fired? I just don’t see it.
And I’d like those who feel they do see it to back up their claims with some proof. Otherwise, all they’re doing is maligning folks like me who were doing their best to let readers have their say.
At the time of Kirby’s art battle with Marvel nearly thirty years earlier, Edelman had sung a different tune. 2
Edelman: I look back to the first few Bullpen Bulletins Pages of 1965-1966, and read: […] “Jack ‘King’ Kirby drops in loaded down with a new mess of masterpieces, once a week. Poor Jack! He’s so absent-minded that he usually goes home with someone else’s hat, portfolio, or train ticket! Stan wanted to put a label around his neck reading: ‘if found, please return to the Merry Marvel Bullpen!’ but he couldn’t—Jack had lost the label!”–and I think to myself, if I lied in 1975, what’s to say Stan wasn’t doing the same in 1965? Was it all really as good-natured as it seemed? Or did some of the joshing sting?
[…]
Alison Lurie, whose most famous novel is The War Between the Tates, wrote in her earlier novel Real Life (1969): “If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.”
The terrible answer is that we are losing our real history. Losing it to people too anxious to collude in the Big Lie for the sake of being inside instead of outside as I once did, not even realizing the enormity of what we were doing. Losing it to those all too willing to say that the Emperor is fully clothed if that will keep them working in comics. Losing it to those for whom the incestuous nature of comics means: Never criticize those who might someday have the power to hire you.
The history of comics should be written by journalists, not by propagandists, and as those who can tell the truth about our past pass on one by one, I’m frightened by the thought that soon it will be too late to undo all the damage done by the propagandists.
The knock letters are only controversial to people who believe the complaints therein were valid. Here’s part of the letter I wrote in response to the Foley article:
Excerpt from my letter of 5 October 2017, printed in TJKC 74
Contrary to the article’s title, the Marvel knock letters are not controversial. To expend so much effort to prove Kirby’s (and Shooter’s) impressions were wrong about the negative letters seems misguided. Shane’s hypothesis: “I’ve read every single letter and you know, they really aren’t that bad.”
Cut to the chase: show the brutal examples from Cap and Black Panther, and call the case closed. Ralph Macchio’s letter, printed a month before he joined the staff, portended the demise of the medium with the fanboy call for “continuity and verisimilitude,” and provided the template for many letters to come. Editor/publisher Robin Snyder, in his letter to Black Panther, asked for some respect for Kirby and an end to the knock letters.
This isn’t a question of balance, and a comparison to the LOC pages of other editors proves nothing. What Shane has left out of the discussion is that Stan Lee wouldn’t have printed a negative letter. The meaningful comparison would be with ’60s letter columns, with Lee writing and answering letters in FF and signing the names of Stan Goldberg and Sol Brodsky: “Your comics are a cut above!” and “Our readers are more intelligent than most!”
The knock letters were the tip of the iceberg of Kirby’s treatment at the hands of the “nest of vipers.” [sic] As we know from stories on the old Kirby mailing list, it was part of a coordinated campaign to discredit him, causing him to take the extreme step of wrestling control of the letters pages away from New York. (Foley significantly asks why the makeup of the letter columns didn’t change.) The campaign was orchestrated by young men of lesser talent who without a shred of gratitude wanted to ride Kirby to success the way Lee had. When Kirby declined, they showed a unanimous lack of class and belittled the guy who made their careers possible. His perception of negativity doesn’t bear contesting: it was Kirby’s perception, and calling him overly sensitive adds insult to injury.
Macchio sets Kirby straight in Eternals #3.
Other points of view
John Morrow: Summer 1978: I attend my first major comics convention, the Atlanta Fantasy Fair, and pick up the Kirby Masterworks Portfolio from Jim Steranko’s Supergraphics table. I meet Stan Lee, and Jack’s new Silver Surfer Graphic Novel pages are on display. But I overhear some Marvel staffers make disparaging comments about how Jack has “lost it” and can’t produce decent work anymore. I am stunned, to say the least, as I’m still enjoying his work greatly at the time.–Stuf’ Said p140
Tom Brevoort: It’s been reported that people in the Marvel offices who weren’t enamored with what Kirby was doing on his titles (and who may have preferred it if he had been drawing stories of their design) filled up his letters pages with “knock letters.” In this instance, they have a point. The whole page is devoted to how divisive Kirby’s return to CAPTAIN AMERICA has been–and while there’s a balance of viewpoints presented, the very fact that the idea of a controversy is acknowledged and given credence plays into the situation. This is a far cry from the typically-laudatory fare that filled most Marvel letters pages. Sure, an occasional knock letter might be printed, but usually those were few and far-between.–blog post, 14 March 2020
Tony Isabella: Sadly, back in the day, staffers with their own agendas would take such cheap shots in letters page that were rarely supervised as closely as they should have been. Witness the letter column piling on Jack Kirby when the King returned to Marvel.–Facebook, 3 May 2020
Others’ perceptions aside, what was Kirby’s experience?
Stephen Bissette: I can only imagine how demoralizing this must have been for Jack; I was freelancing at Marvel around this time, and it was heartbreaking to see with one’s own eyes various photocopies of Kirby’s work posted around the offices with “satiric” overdrawings and sarcastic written comments scrawled on them. The utter contempt for and jeering at Kirby’s work for the company was mortifying, and a stern lesson for a budding freelancer working to (maybe) get one’s foot in the door.–Jack Kirby! group, 10 September 2019
Mark Evanier and Michael Vassallo had this exchange on the Kirby-L mailing list in October and November 1996.
Mark Evanier: Jack had a certain amount of autonomy in that his books were mostly self-contained. In fact, the reason Jack refused to do FANTASTIC FOUR or to guest other Marvel characters was that he didn’t want to consult with other creators, didn’t want to get involved with the office politics that surrounded the mainstream Marvel titles.
Archie Goodwin, whom Jack respected greatly, kept in touch with Jack and did do a little editing on the books, sometimes rewriting (or allowing his assistants to rewrite) a line or a caption. Jack once showed me a splash page to a CAPTAIN AMERICA where someone in New York had rewritten some of his copy. He asked me to explain what this had accomplished and I couldn’t; the rewritten text was not substantially better or different in meaning…it was just different. Some of the other editorial changes were more logical.
Jack’s feelings about this work (and his concern about his letters pages trashing him, which someone else mentioned) will perhaps make more sense if you know that there was at least one editorial staffer at Marvel at the time who was quite vocal in his dislike of Kirby writing, and who felt HE should have the job of doing the dialogue. Jack told me that this guy would phone him up and say, “Well, your new issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA just arrived, Mr. Kirby, and the artwork is breathtaking but everyone here in the office [a gross exaggeration] agrees that the writing is shit. Your books are all bombing, too. The only way you can save your career is to have one of us take over doing the dialogue.” Or words to that effect.
Michael Vassallo: You mean to tell me that some disrespectful moron at Marvel actually said to Jack personally that his writing was “shit”? You’d better keep his name a secret Mark. This is one livid Sicilian here!! Even 20 years after the fact I’m appalled.
Mark Evanier: It’s true and there were some worse incidents than that.
I misquoted Kirby in my letter to TJKC. Here’s the quote in context, from the interview conducted by Howard Zimmerman for March 1982’s Comics Scene #2:
Jack Kirby: “The health of a comic book can be manipulated by the staff alone. You fill up a book with knock letters [negative criticisms in the letters pages]. The reader who picks up the book and reads all those knock letters knows that the book he’s reading… well, it’s not so hot. And if you do it consistently, it becomes ‘a bad book.’ I haven’t seen anything like a bad book anywhere. I’ve seen a lot of guys trying. I’ve seen a lot of guys who’ll never get the chance to develop. And you can’t develop with two or three issues. You’ve got to give a man a chance to stay in there—either take his beating or succeed. And comics have not done this today.
“A guy will create a book, another will fill his book up with knock letters—he’s off in five months, or three months, and the other guy’s got his shot.” Until now Kirby has spoken in even tones. His voice quiet, firm. Now emotion breaks through. There is an anguished look in his eyes and a touch of bitterness in his voice as he says, “I see it as a serpent’s nest. And in a serpent’s nest, nothing can survive. Eventually all the snakes kill each other. Eventually they’ll also kill whatever generated them.”
Kirby was attacked out of the gate. When he submitted the pages for his first issue of Captain America, Roy Thomas was permitted to pass judgment by annotating a set of photocopied pencils. On the first page, Thomas wrote, “NICE ART—lousy dialogue.” Someone saw fit to send the set to Kirby (the copies were found in his files). Morrow added it to the Thomas interview in TJKC 74, with this caption:
Morrow: Roy doesn’t recall this specifically, but someone at Marvel (Verpoorten, Brodsky, or Stan Lee perhaps) loaned him a set of pencil photocopies of Captain America #193 for feedback. After Roy wrote his honest assessment of the issue (though today he wishes he had used a slightly less opprobrious adjective than “lousy”), someone at Marvel mailed these in-house copies to Jack—a thoughtless move at best, and one that helped get Kirby’s 1970s Marvel tenure off to a rocky start.
Some background
Lee: In the 1960s, he took the transferable skills he’d developed during the previous twenty years writing teen humour and fumetti, 3 and wrote wisecracks for superheroes in situations devised by Kirby. He wouldn’t allow Kirby’s stories or characters to take themselves seriously. He used his position as family to exaggerate the work he did, and paid himself accordingly.
Kirby: His stories, concepts, and storytelling techniques were often over Lee’s head. Lee simplified them, dumbing down his audience in the process. As he did this, he told readers the opposite was true: where intelligence was concerned, they were a cut above the competition’s audience. He told them that he was the writer, and Kirby was the artist.
The audience: Lee raised up an army he called True Believers by befriending them through the editorial pages and captions. He made a connection with them, engendering a fierce loyalty; as their best pal, he was persuasive. They learned his wisdom was not to be questioned, but to be defended for the rest of their days.
Robert Beerbohm: Face Front, True Believer. Mark Seifert has me mostly all-in convinced this [the 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer] (and similar) propaganda tools were used to mind control audiences. Stan Lee used this book “creating” all the levels & terms during his PT Barnum barn-storming days of daze back in the 60s 70s… Many of the creative types in the comics business [like Lee] had also been in the US Army Signal Corps. That is American Propaganda section sharpening melding molding young minds.—Marvel Method group, 16 November 2019
By 1970, a fresh narrative was being ushered in to protect the intellectual property of Marvel’s new owners; the revised history was unveiled in Origins of Marvel Comics and its sequels. The message was delivered by Lee, and its key purpose was to preemptively discredit Kirby’s side of the story. With no contracts to define the terms of his employment, if Kirby were ever to be taken seriously (by the Supreme Court, for instance), there would be financial ramifications. The living narrative, Lee, propounded the precept that Kirby couldn’t write, and later that Kirby was not to be believed.
Kirby had gone on to his Fourth World at DC, where his own words on the pages made it clear that his stories were serious. Gone were Lee’s wisecracks and constant winking at the reader about the ridiculousness of intelligent kids reading comics. Some True Believers felt out of their element and declared Kirby’s dialogue un-Marvel-like, and that, by extension, Kirby was washed up without Lee.
Nigel Kitching once told another Kirby lister why Kirby’s Fourth World was better for Kirby having left Marvel to do it:
Nigel: …some of the great ideas in the Fourth World stuff would have been quite beyond Stan Lee to articulate in a Marvel Style script.
Mark (looking for a fight) said: Like what?
Nigel: Stan’s massive features would never have cracked wide and laughed at the Cosmic Joke. He wouldn’t have understood at all. He’d just have climbed on his little soapbox and had Darkseid trot out some liberal banalities about the face of evil.
Stan would never have understood that Lightray’s benign smiles hid a cold and calculating heart.
The Justifier concept would have been too difficult for him – the idea of ordinary men being capable of evil acts because some authority figure is willing to take onboard the guilt.
Kirby had such depth to his characters but this fact was obscured by some unfortunate word skills. Actually I don’t even think it was unfortunate. I’ve grown to really like Kirby’s writing style on the whole. All the characterisation is there but Kirby requires that his reader finds it himself. He’s not going to hit you over the head with his characters’ personalities. Writers in the seventies were so heavy handed with their ‘characterisation’ and they would labour it to death until they were damn sure that the audience just couldn’t miss the point. They look stupid now in retrospect but Kirby’s writing continues to intrigue and subsequent readings still bring up something new. I read Himon recently – this is such an intriguing story. Himon isn’t a person he’s a symbol of independence in a totalitarian society.
Stan wrote good dialogue but this sort of thing isn’t his cup of tea (and maybe not yours). But I like characters who represent ideas rather than just being personalities in a story.
When I say that it wouldn’t work in a Marvel style what I mean is that Lee would have misinterpreted Kirby’s intentions. He was already doing this before Kirby left Marvel.— Kirby-L, 11 March 2000
After Kirby’s departure, Marvel was where failed artist fanboys flocked with the dream of adding the words to other people’s stories. Kirby had built the House of Ideas, but Lee built a system where some of the “writers” received the full writing page rate for filling in the words on finished stories. It’s unsurprising that Buscema, Windsor-Smith, and Adams consider themselves to be the authors of work for which someone else received the writing pay.
Roy Thomas likes to tell the story of acting as peacemaker when Kirby was considering a return.
Thomas: “Jack, Stan would really like you back. He obviously never wanted you to leave.” I wanted to point out that he wasn’t given any choice, but instead I just said, “He didn’t want you to leave. He’d be overjoyed to have you come back.” I said, “The only thing in the way, really—he was kind of hurt and bothered when you did that Funky Flashman stuff in that one title, where you made a character who was a rather vicious—.” You know, I’m just honest with Jack. I mean, I didn’t know him that well, but I’m going to tell him the truth, because I knew how Stan had felt about it. I said, “Now, you had this character called Houseroy.” I said, “I didn’t mind about that because I didn’t feel you were really aiming that at me. I was just Stan’s flunky and this and that.” Okay, so I am Stan’s flunky or whatever. And Houseroy is a clever name. I didn’t really mind that much. And I was almost a sympathetic character. But it was such a nasty lampoon of Stan.
And Jack gives this nervous little laugh and says, “Well, you know, it was all in fun.” And I had to pretend to let that go, because if there was one thing I was sure about, it was that Funky Flashman was not ‘all in fun.’ It was Jack, it was his repressed—as close as he had come to slugging Stan in the nose. But I just pretended to believe that it was all in fun and just let that go… 4
A couple of things to note: 1, (a critical cog in the Lee version of events), Lee was the injured party when Kirby finally got tired enough of Lee’s ongoing theft to quit ; and 2, Thomas didn’t mind being portrayed as Houseroy, but Kirby was just a big meanie and he hurt Lee’s feelings. In reality, Funky Flashman is probably the truest picture of Stan Lee the world is likely to see.
Mike Royer: I loved working on this book, just loved it.
Tom Kraft: Did you laugh a lot?
Mike: I just thought it was a hoot! It was a hoot because it was so damn true. There are some people that think it’s vicious and overdone… well, I’m not one of them. 5
When Kirby returned to Marvel, he declined to revisit the Marvel Method charade, and never again shared the credit for his writing. The jilted wannabe “writers,” convinced of, or simply repeating, the mantra that Kirby’s work was nothing without an in-house Marvel writer, made their jealousy known.
Eric Stedman: All of this is nothing more than vilification of a mature genius–who is only one man–by greedy young dumbshits in order to try and justify theft of his creations. A total gang-gaslighting job and completely reprehensible.—Marvel Method group, 15 April 2020
My mother, an elementary school teacher, wouldn’t allow comics in the house in the ‘60s; we read books instead. Possibly intuiting the existence of a Stan Lee, she reasoned that comics were for people who couldn’t read. By the time I had a paper route and could buy my own comics, I came to Kirby by way of Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke; Star Trek, 2001, and Apes. Kirby’s dialogue grabbed me; Lee’s (all in the past by that point) was overwrought. Then, as now, Kirby’s writing stood as literature, and I discovered it before I could be told otherwise.
The idea that Kirby’s stories needed to be fixed is the sleight-of-hand at the heart of the Marvel Method. The reality is that Kirby’s work was self-contained, and a perfect balance of words and pictures based on his decades of experience. Lee’s changes and additions, in the name of justifying the appropriation of the writing pay, were simply vandalism. Lee was often lost when it came to Kirby’s intentions in a story, a character, or a panel, so he would pull it out by the roots and pave it over. When this couldn’t be achieved through dialogue alone, he demanded redraws.
Asked about the Fourth World in his recent TJKC interview, Thomas spouted the usual nonsense that Kirby needed to be reined in as he was with Simon and Lee. (This is another misrepresentation that’s essential to uphold the notion that Kirby couldn’t write. The truth is Simon was happy to stay out of Kirby’s way because his work sold comics; Lee’s “reining in” consisted of shitting all over Kirby’s work.) Thomas then admitted he didn’t get the Fourth World: “I was still in awe of Jack, you know? Despite the fact that I had hit the wall with that New Gods stuff and everything.”
Edelman’s rationalization (“we were ungrateful punks but Kirby couldn’t write”) might help him sleep at night, but it’s misguided. Kirby couldn’t write in a world where Lee, Thomas, and Englehart 6 are considered good writers; a very small world where the company line is still parroted, that the epitome of comic dialogue is Lee’s misogynistic teen humour. I was not a Marvel fan, I was a Kirby fan: I had no use for their writing, and have no use for their criticism. By Thomas’ own admission he didn’t understand Kirby’s writing, so he’s not in a position to judge.
Patrick Ford: The fact of the matter is that not only was Kirby a writer, he was a great writer in a medium where dreadful writing is common. One of the main reasons super hero comic book fans detest Kirby’s writing is because it isn’t anything like what they are used to reading. Kirby’s writing has been widely praised by novelists like Harlan Ellison, Glen David Gold, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Neil Gaiman. Comic book writer Grant Morrison has compared Kirby to William Blake, and commented comics fans who don’t appreciate Kirby’s writing simply don’t have Kirby’s “reading list.”—comments section, Deadline.com, 15 August 2011.
Marvel was envisioned and executed by Kirby, with added words and promotion by Lee. It’s no mystery why Thomas needs to attest to a backwards version, a Marvel envisioned and scripted by Lee and facilitated by Kirby: it’s the history in which he has invested everything. Thomas is treated as an expert witness in The KIRBY Collector, where Foley’s article is just a symptom of the decades-long process of discrediting Kirby.
Chris Tolworthy: So the quality of Kirby’s thinking matters. Just how right was he? I think he correctly predicted the future. So it matters the that he was not just well read, but a deep thinker of the absolute highest order. Because he may have all the answers. That is why I like Kirby. And why I study him like he is some kind of prophet. Because I believe he is.—Jack Kirby Dialogue group, 5 June 2020
I wrote in a Jack Kirby Quarterly article, 7 “there’s extraordinary depth in Kirby’s work that not only invites but rewards a deeper reading.” This is clear to me, but I’ve had many online discussions with people who insist there is no deeper meaning, no great intellect behind the work. These same people will tell me Kirby’s work wasn’t complete without Lee’s teen humour dialogue.
These discussions leave me baffled: is it a question of someone’s reading level when they first encountered Kirby’s own words, or is it a matter of indoctrination? Kirby was predominantly a writer, and Lee’s narrative takes that away from him. The art of Kirby the writer necessarily grew more expressionistic as he aged, but he had increasingly more important things to say. (The Lee version tells us Kirby’s later work is a joke and that he had lost it.) Lee, in contrast, didn’t have anything to say through the work, even if any could honestly be attributed to him.
Eric Stedman: It’s a lot easier to add a silly word balloon and caption to a painting than it is to create a painting. It’s also easy then after you do that to decide that since you bought the rights to it and you “contributed” something to it that you “created” the final image.—Marvel Method group, 11 June 2020
Lee unflatteringly characterized his pre-FF readers as “drooling juveniles and semicretins,” and according to one of his revisionist anecdotes, he set out to reform them based on his wife’s advice to be a better writer. 8 Proof that the story was a fabrication is that a. his actual approach was to dumb down the smart stories that were turned in to him, and b. he failed dramatically: at the end of the process the readers were no wiser but Lee was wealthier. My mother might have been slightly off base suggesting comics were for people who couldn’t read. Lee’s marks pigeons dupes pals didn’t raise their reading level, but they did learn how to be told what to think, and how to defend a false premise to the death.
I can’t force someone to like or understand Kirby’s work, but it’s comforting to know that his portrayal at the hands of the propagandists will eventually die off with them. Future historians will actually read the work, not the fabricated history of the work, and they will think for themselves.
Footnotes
back1 Asked to comment during the writing of this post, Kraft (an unrepentant Kirby fan) said it was safe to say Shooter was mistaken. “Take what he says with an entire mine of salt.”
back2 Scott Edelman, “Stan Lee Was My Co-Pilot,” The Comics Journal 99, June 1983.
back3 In the two-month period in 1961 leading up to the advent of FF #1, the Kirby concept that was green-lighted by Goodman, Lee signed stories in these titles: Rawhide Kid, Patsy Walker, Kathy, Life with Millie, Gunsmoke Western, Kid Colt Outlaw, Love Romances, Linda Carter Student Nurse, Millie the Model. When Lee realized that superheroes were starting to dominate the market to the exclusion of his bread and butter, he eventually stopped delegating the “writing” of their stories to his brother.
back4 “The Terrific Roy Thomas,” The Jack Kirby Collector #74, Spring 2018.
back5 Mike Royer with Rand Hoppe and Tom Kraft, Fourth World Summer, Special Episode, The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center YouTube channel, 4 June 2020.
back6 Adding to the chorus of ignorance, Robert Kirkman or the writers of his Secret History of Marvel felt the need to give airtime to Steve Englehart, of all people, commenting on Kirby’s writing: “The thing about Kirby is, he couldn’t write… we found out, for sure. He had a terrible ear for dialogue, just, you know, off-putting, clanky dialogue…”
back7 “Drag Your Battered Bones,” Jack Kirby Quarterly #15, Winter 2008.
back8 Joan Lee allegedly told her husband to “write stories that you yourself would enjoy reading.” Stan Lee, “How I Invented Spider-Man,” Quest Magazine, July/August 1977.
As Kirby worked, he would not only draw the story and invent new characters where necessary, he would write marginal notes to Stan, including suggested captions and dialogue, so that when Stan wrote the dialogue, he would know what story points Kirby felt should be made in each panel. Stan would then write dialogue based on Kirby’s notes and perhaps a brief conversation.
This is why Cadence/Marvel started demanding in the 1970s that artists, such as Jack Kirby, sign agreements such as the 1972 Agreement assigning to Marvel all previous Kirby work published by Marvel. Similarly Cadence/Marvel sought to comply with the new Copyright Act’s explicit work-for-hire provisions, by having freelancers sign “work-for-hire” releases as to prior work long after such had been created. Cadence was trying to “clean up,” if not revise, Marvel’s past to protect what had become valuable intellectual property. Decades after the success of the key Kirby characters, Marvel, under its new corporate parents, Perfect Film/Cadence, attempted to “clean up” Marvel’s ownership claim to what had become comic book franchises by re-writing history. —Mark Evanier, Declaration in Support of Summary Judgment (Filing 74).
Mark Evanier doesn’t get thanked enough for the service he did the Kirby family when they were sued by Marvel. The Justia website has parts of his two depositions, and his three declarations (including his Expert Report) in their entirety. His Amicus Brief for the Supreme Court case is also online. 1
Judge McMahon excluded the expert testimony of Evanier and John Morrow because they weren’t present during the years covered by Marvel’s lawsuit (1958-1963). By that measure, the testimony of Roy Thomas and John Romita should also have been tossed: they both arrived on the scene in 1965, hence everything they had to say about the years in question was hearsay. Thomas confided to Jim Amash in 1997 that his knowledge of events was acquired solely by speaking to Stan Lee and Sol Brodsky, and not to the freelancers. His early Marvel “history” was either second-hand or fabricated as required over the years. In contrast, Evanier’s expert testimony provided a welcome dose of reality since it was informed by his decades-long relationship with Kirby.
If Kirby were still alive he probably wouldn’t spend time taking issue with what little Evanier has done for him lately, but now it seems Mark’s ambition is to make sure Kirby doesn’t get a swelled head. Any time I’ve encountered him online since the settlement, he’s been defending Stan Lee against the literal interpretation of two decades of Kirby’s interviews; this without regard for the question of whether Lee needs defending. I’ve been able to engage Mark on the question in a couple of Facebook discussions in the past year, where he made two points. First, the freelancers at Marvel don’t represent the only side of the story. Second, the material evidence doesn’t necessarily say what we think it says.
In September 2019, Stephen Bissette posted a brief review of Alter Ego #160, the Steve Ditko “tribute” issue. Thanks to Bob Heer’s blog, I was aware of Ditko’s writings, and Bissette’s 2013 blog series, Digging Ditko, 2 convinced me to start purchasing the work as it was published.
Reading the Steve Ditko commemorative issue of ALTER EGO, and still flummoxed at the utter disconnect between readily apparent cause-and-effect and the ongoing bizarre, caricature-like verbal portraits of Ditko and his decisions.
Thankfully, the ALTER EGO texts do acknowledge, cite, and quote Ditko’s own published accounts (via Ditko’s serialized book-length account of his Silver Age years in Robin Snyder’s THE COMICS) and stated reasons for his departure, which, again, are ample and crystal clear. Still, it’s disheartening to read yet again and again the same… old… shit, when it’s high time “fans” stopped spinning the same… old… shit. —Stephen Bissette, 8 September 2019.
Mark Evanier joined the discussion to provide information about the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons. He later segued into undermining Bissette’s premise by calling into question Ditko’s version of events: Ditko said he was cut off from communicating with Lee for over a year ending in his 1965 departure from Marvel. Not only was Evanier bucking the consensus in the thread, he was going against the assessment of Roy Thomas in the very magazine being reviewed. Evanier made it clear that he didn’t put much stock in Ditko’s writing, and cited unpublished interviews with Lee and Sol Brodsky for informing his own take on the situation.
Patrick Ford responded: Put me down as believing Ditko. For one thing there are a number of very similar stories concerning Lee which come from Kirby and Wood. Ditko specifically wrote that Lee refused to come out and speak to him. Also, this isn’t a topic Ditko addressed once. He’s written about it several times… As to why Brodsky would say something different. Well, Brodsky was a Marvel employee. Also Brodsky would not be proud of the role he played in the situation between Lee and Ditko… No one walked into Lee’s office. It was locked at all times. This is clear from the Ted White interview. A buzzer from the outer office would sound and Lee had to let Brodsky or whoever in… According to Ditko (I happen to have his essays) when he had to communicate with Lee it was through Flo Steinberg or Brodsky. This is the way it worked because Lee refused to speak to Ditko.
I was disappointed at Evanier’s obliviousness to the implications of his claims, and questioned the validity of Lee’s words on this or any subject dealing with Marvel’s history. I pointed out that Lee and Brodsky were the same two cited by Thomas in 1997 for shaping his claimed belief that Kirby had created little at early Marvel. Thomas based his history, not on what he learned speaking to the freelancers, but on “what little [he] heard talking to Lee and Brodsky.” 3
Regarding Ditko, I quoted Thomas in Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics Episode 1: By the time I was there, Steve Ditko never came by the office except for a couple of minutes to drop something off, because Stan had decided that there was just no sense in the two of them speaking…
Elsewhere in the thread I related Thomas’ AE 160 comments: It never occurred to me to ask whose idea the no-speak situation had been; but of course, common sense dictated that it had to have been Stan’s decision. As editor, he was technically Ditko’s superior. Years later, in writings for his friend and partner Robin Snyder’s newsletter The Comics!, the artist confirmed that obvious assumption.
Comparing it to arguing politics with Trump supporters, Mark pointed out the futility of convincing people that Stan Lee was to blame for his falling-out with Ditko. I (somewhat rudely) asked why Lee is even given a say when by that point he had already assumed his false identity as creator, a charade that he maintained until his death. Evanier responded that having dealt with, and worked for, Lee, he didn’t “buy into the premise that if you catch him lying about one thing, it’s fair to assume he’s lying about everything.”
Later I was kicking myself that I didn’t think to ask Mark which “one thing” he meant.
A few months later, Evanier showed up to dispute a Ferran Delgado post which suggested that Kirby’s penciled lettering in story balloons in 1961 indicated that Kirby wrote those stories. Mark commented that Kirby’s penciled lettering didn’t necessarily mean Kirby had written the words he was penciling, alluding to the (relatively recent) company line that Kirby was working from the scripts of others. 4
I pointed out to Mark that Kirby had been quoted on the subject in the TCJ interview. Why, I asked him, was Lee’s version always given the benefit of the doubt despite the odds of a given Lee quote being a lie, while Kirby’s version is contested despite the only evidence against it being the word of Stan Lee? I reiterated pertinent points from the interview:
Kirby told Gary Groth that he wrote (specifically) the monster stories.
Kirby told Groth that Lee noticed that Kirby was taking home a bigger paycheque, and that Kirby was made to “render unto Caesar.” Lee started taking the writing pay.
The physical evidence shows Lee didn’t sign any of Kirby’s monster stories.
Nine years after the interview, Lee and Thomas interviewed each other for publication in Comic Book Artist #2; their agenda for the discussion involved openly scoffing at Kirby’s claims. 5 Evanier admitted not understanding Kirby’s comments in the TCJ interview at all.
Eric Stedman, Jack Kirby! group, 17 February 2020: I never felt that Kirby exaggerated in that interview at all. I picked up this magazine when it came out and I understood what he meant when he said Stan Lee never wrote anything. Which was that Lee 1. did not originate anything or know how to come up with good ideas and 2. did not know how to construct a story plot. Which is true, he couldn’t do either one. His addition of dialogue was cosmetic, involved no real thought, and was likely based on Kirby’s notes or rough versions anyway most of the time. And asking Jack Kirby or any other artist to come up with an entire story in pictures including original characters and costume designs and everything else is NOT “collaboration,” it’s commissioning the preliminary version of a work which is in essence complete and just needs to be embellished by others. This interview definitely included some tough talk by Kirby but I don’t doubt a word of what he said.
Though my opinion may be viewed by some as non-objective, I can say that my father spoke the truth in this interview.6 —Neal Kirby
Evanier cautioned that there are actual Kirby quotes, ready to be used to entrap someone inclined to call Lee a liar, that prove that not everything Kirby said was true. Kirby once talked about doing work for Filmation, when he actually worked for DePatie-Freleng. Mark suggested that, by my standards for the TCJ interview, his disbelieving that Kirby worked for Filmation meant he was calling Kirby a liar. He has a similar example in the FAQ on his website: But for all the things Jack did well, he was not great at being interviewed. He occasionally got carried away or confused. There was one interview where, without realizing what he was saying, he said he’d created Superman. Needless to say, he never really believed that but somehow, that’s what came out of his mouth.7
I responded with a comparison: Mark, I see what you’re saying. You’re saying that Lee accidentally misspoke when he said…
“I would have to think [Kirby has] either lost his mind or he’s a very evil person.”9
And (under oath): “In the 60s, the ideas for the new characters originated with me because that was my responsibility… And I dreamed up the Fantastic Four, and I wrote a brief outline.”10 —Stan Lee
Kirby misspoke on occasion, by accident. Lee’s falsification of history was deliberate and pervasive.
In another FB thread recently, Mark and Steve Sherman both stated unequivocally that they’d never known Kirby to lie. Kirby did have something to say regarding the writing in the monster stories, and instead of looking at the evidence through the lens of Kirby’s claim, Evanier has dismissed the claim. Among that select group of people who have actually heard of Jack Kirby, Evanier’s Kirby biography has been much anticipated for over two decades. Kirby now finds himself in the unenviable position of battling for credibility in its pages with the world’s most beloved serial liar.
Rewriting Comics History: Stan Lee has been positioning himself in the public consciousness as the living embodiment of the Marvel spirit for so log now he’s actually managed to make people believe in his megalomaniacal view of history. The fact of the matter is that Lee had a lot less to do with the vaunted “Marvel Philosophy” and the revolutionary Marvel approach to comic books than either Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. It was Kirby who created unworldly epics in Fantastic Four and it was Kirby who spun morality tales in Captain America. It was Ditko who made Spider-Man the “everyman” comic book and it was Ditko who created the unmatched fantasy in Dr. Strange.—Joe Brancatelli, 1980.
Lee exited the 1960s, in the eyes of some, as the industry’s buffoon. With a remarkable media biltz that began after Kirby’s departure, he laid claim to the writing and the creation of the properties; subsequent comic histories are infected with his account. The current situation exists because Lee was a master of manipulation of public sentiment, and used his power to dilute the concept of truth. As I asked Mark Evanier in the Steve Ditko exchange, why does Stan Lee get to be interviewed at all? Mark chose to bring politics into the discussion, so the obvious comparison is an illegitimate president taking credit for, or attempting to abolish, the achievements of his predecessor. With no creations Lee could legitimately call his own, he was intent on taking credit for Kirby’s.
One thing that tripped me up previously was Jack’s 1989 Comics Journal #134 interview, since back in the day, Kirby came across to me as a little nutty-sounding with some of the bitter recollections he brought to light. The most egregious is when he said, “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.”—John Morrow, Stuf’ Said, First Edition, p 158[Second Edition p 173]
In the final chapter of Stuf’ Said, “The Verdict,” John Morrow revealed that despite the nice things he’d said about Kirby in the previous 150 pages (how it was a revelation to him that Kirby had disputed Lee’s ‘70s disinformation campaign consistently, early, and often, and not just to Gary Groth), he concluded that it was Kirby’s words that were “egregious.”
Morrow: I may not like this explanation, but I don’t have any evidence to prove it’s wrong. So I have to give Stan a pass, like I gave Jack on his 1989 “Stan never wrote anything” comment.—158[173]
This is false equivalence: the red letters in Morrow’s book consistently represent untruth, often baldfaced. Kirby’s comment will eventually prove to have been based in truth, but is not given the same benefit of the doubt that’s always given to Lee’s claims, for instance the tale about JLA sales. 11
Morrow: I will say that, ignoring a few minor discrepancies, I found both men have been pretty consistent in their accounts over the years. So no, I don’t think either man is a liar by any stretch of the imagination.—158[173]
Based on the evidence in Stuf’ Said, surely a judgment could be rendered on the content, not just the consistency, of Lee’s account. When it’s obvious that Lee is lying, Morrow decides that we don’t need to call it lying.
Morrow: Lee usually does more than just reword Kirby’s margin notes, sometimes changing Kirby’s meaning to make the story more in keeping with his own tastes. He views that dialogue creation as “writing” the story.—8[8]
Morrow determined that, solely based on Lee’s “unorthodox” definition of writing, Lee didn’t lie. The definition itself was a lie, arising from the necessity for Lee to redirect the writing page rate from Kirby’s pocket to his own. Lee took the stories Kirby had written, with suggested dialogue penciled into the balloons or margins, and added dialogue. In some cases Lee took his cue from Mort Weisinger and passed off plots from Kirby story conferences as his own. 12
As is now well documented, Mort made a habit of enticing writers to give him plot ideas which he would turn around and give to other writers as his own. He was addicted to the thievery of ideas.—William Woolfolk, 1978.
Morrow: Jack is also guilty of taking too much credit, even if it’s only in reaction to Lee’s grandstanding.—159[174]
This statement is the most deserving of the book’s “egregious” label, but even amidst a relatively comprehensive collection of six decades of Lee’s misdirection, Morrow could only find against Kirby. He is willing to look at writing from Lee’s point of view, but studiously avoids looking at creation and writing from Kirby’s. Examination of the completed work Kirby turned in to Lee, as was done in a series of Mike Gartland articles Morrow once published, shows Kirby could never be guilty of taking too much credit.
When the one thing used to cast Kirby’s words as lies is the fact that his account contradicted Lee’s, it’s time to look more critically at Lee’s account. Lee’s record of lying should trigger an automatic fact check, but instead his words are used as the only measure of Kirby’s truthfulness. Instead of Kirby’s accounts in interviews being dismissed wholesale for that one reason, they should be taken on their own merits as an accurate representation of aspects of Marvel’s history.
From the time he opened the lines of communication with his readers and with Jerry Bails, Lee misrepresented the situation. The foundational “truth” of his fabricated persona is a falsehood: “I created the characters and wrote the stories.” Everything that followed built on that falsehood, and was therefore false.
The problem here is not that we don’t have eyewitness testimony, it’s that we have conflicting eyewitness testimony. The people involved disagree. If we can’t rely on first-person testimony, what can we do? I think The Confessor, in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City said it best, “Look at the facts, look at the patterns, and look for what doesn’t fit. Base your deductions on that.”13 —Stan Taylor
In this, Lee has succeeded spectacularly: Ditko and Kirby were reliable witnesses, but Lee’s ability to falsify history has caused even historians like Taylor and biographers like Evanier to conclude that all are unreliable. Richard Schickel has passed on, but his assessment of Disney’s control of the narrative remains spot on.
Mark Evanier and John Morrow, with the help of Stan Lee, are assembling the Jack Kirby chapter of The Disney Version. It’s time to look at Kirby’s story in light of the physical evidence, rather than validating it against a fictitious account that’s never subject to the slightest scrutiny.
Bonus link: When I started my response to Stuf’ Said, part of the motivation was to present some of the information that was left out of the book. I included it as the last installment of my multi-part review, and it rarely gets accessed. Here’s a direct link to Further Information.
Footnotes
back1Here are parts of Mark Evanier’s two depositions, excerpted by Marvel (Filing 65, Attachments 8 and 9), and the Kirbys’ lawyer Marc Toberoff (Filing 95, Attachments 2 and 3), and his declarations (Filings 74, 88, and 90). Exhibit A (Attachment 1) at Filing 90 is his Expert Report. This is Mark’s Amicus Brief for the Supreme Court case.
back3 Roy Thomas interviewed by Jim Amash, conducted by phone in September 1997, published in The Jack Kirby Collector #18, January 1998.
back4 In 1974, Lee wrote that “Jack and I were having a ball turning out monster stories” (Origins of Marvel Comics, p 15), and in TJKC #77 Will Murray cited a 1995 interview with Larry Lieber saying he wrote scripts for Kirby’s monster stories. Lieber’s version was endorsed by Alter Ego in 1999.
back5 Possibly conducted shortly before Lee was fired by Marvel, Lee and Thomas resumed the propaganda initiative begun with Origins by ridiculing Kirby’s TCJ interview.
back6 Comments section, “TCJ Archive: Jack Kirby Interview,” The Comics Journal website, 2 June 2011.
back8 Janet Bode, A Comic Book Artist KO’d: Jack Kirby’s Six-Year Slugfest with Marvel, The Village Voice, December 8, 1987.
back9 Steve Duin, “The Back Story on Stan Lee vs. Jack Kirby,” The Oregonian/OregonLive, 26 June 2011.
back10 Stan Lee deposition, 13 May 2010, Filing 65, Exhibit 1.
back11 The JLA discussion continues to resurface, even after the apocryphal golf element was discredited, with even Evanier weighing in against Kirby. The current reasoning goes, “Well, it could have happened that way, so it must have.” No one mentions that the timing doesn’t work, or the Challengers elephant in the room, or the fact that the JLA sales story was unleashed on an unsuspecting public, not in 1961, but in 1974.
back12 Evidence of Lee making Kirby plots his own to distribute to others shows up in the early issues of Spider-Man, Thor, and Iron Man. Larry Lieber’s belief that he was writing scripts for Kirby based on Lee’s plots could also be explained by this sequence of events: Lee “devising” a plot based on Kirby’s finished pages; Lee passing along the plot to Lieber to be scripted; then Lee and Lieber invoicing for plot and script respectively. Lee chose to start claiming plot credit in 1962 on a Strange Tales story that was plotted by Kirby; he also signed every splash page of FF #6 even though it was plotted, dialogued, and penciled by Kirby.
In January 2019 I emailed Roy Thomas to take exception to a caption in one of the Stan Lee tribute issues of Alter Ego. Thomas printed my letter in the very next Lee tribute issue, less than a year later. Right above my letter, he printed an online comment suggesting there should be a club called the Legion of Anti-Stan Lee ***holes, and pronounced the comment “succinct.” Below is my letter, followed by both of our responses.
My Letter
Jan 10, 2018, 8:36 PM
Hi Roy,
I’m writing to take exception to this caption on page 10 of Alter Ego #150:
Stan suspects he may have written the entirety of the infamous giant-monster yarn “Fin Fang Foom” in Strange Tales #89 (Oct. 1961), on sale around the same time as Fantastic Four #1; but there are no credits for writer or artists on this splash for the 13-pager; so maybe Larry Lieber or someone else provided the actual script from Stan’s plot. Pencils by Jack Kirby; inks by Dick Ayers.
I don’t hold out much hope that you’ll publish this, but I’m cc’ing Jon and John in the unlikely event that they’d print a rebuttal.
By “around the same time” you mean Strange Tales #89 was published the month before FF #1.
The compulsion to inveigle Stan Lee into admitting that he had something to do with “Fin Fang Foom” needs to be addressed. In the interview accompanying the caption (conducted in 1988), Will Murray prompted Lee with hearsay:
WM: Most people think you wrote the lead fantasy stories, like “Fin Fang Foom,” even though you didn’t sign them.
LEE: I did that one. If my name was on them, I did. I never put my name on anything that I didn’t write.
Unsigned.
Ten years later, you chose a similar tack (Comic Book Artist #2, 1998):
Roy: By Fantastic Four #1, you had developed what later came to be called “the Marvel style.” But you were doing this all along for some monster stories, some time before this. How far back does that go?
Stan: You mean just doing synopses for the artists? Was I doing them before Marvel?
Roy: I know that you did it for Fantastic Four. So I figured with Jack as the artist—and maybe Ditko, too—in these minor stories that you mostly wrote, along with Larry Lieber, you must have been doing it since the monster days.
Stan: You know something, Roy? Now that you say it, that’s probably true; but I had never thought of that. I thought that I started it with the Fantastic Four, but you’re probably right.
Roy: You probably didn’t write full scripts for Jack for “Fin Fang Foom.”
Lee said he didn’t remember specifically what he did on “Fin Fang Foom,” but you helpfully supplied the memory for him. You yourself didn’t arrive on the scene until 1965, and conveniently, your only source of information regarding Lee’s working relationship with Kirby, was Lee.
As Murray indicated, Lee did not sign “Fin Fang Foom.” Michael Vassallo has observed that Lee did not sign a single Kirby “monster” story (monster, science fiction, or fantasy), an indication that he didn’t write any of them. As to whether Lee would forget to sign something, he has even signed one-page paper doll features in Millie the Model (and each one if they were printed two to a page). As for Lee’s claim of never signing something he didn’t write, see Mike Breen’s Jack Kirby Collector #61 article for one of many possible instances of a Lee signature (one on every splash, in fact) that wasn’t necessarily backed up by any writing involvement.
Lee “probably didn’t write full scripts” for Kirby on “Fin Fang Foom,” or any other story – it remains to be proven whether he ever wrote a script, period. Although Lee was known to purchase scripts (most famously from Magazine Management writers) and assign them, Steve Ditko has written that he never got a full script from Lee. Vince Fago worked on humour comics with Lee prior to World War II and said he never got a script from Lee, that Lee was using the synopsis method.
Next, we can dispense with the idea that “Fin Fang Foom” was written “Marvel style”: Kirby’s penciled lettering is visible in the balloons and captions.
Nor was Lee working “Marvel style” with Kirby in this later story from Strange Tales #99, nearly a year after FF #1 (again, Kirby’s lettering is visible in the balloons).
In Episode 1 of Robert Kirkman’s “Secret History of Comics” (2017), you trotted out your old stand-by: “For years, Jack Kirby didn’t care that he wasn’t being listed as a writer. Later on when something becomes successful, then everybody starts saying, ‘This percentage of it’s mine!’ ‘That percentage of it’s mine!'”
Roy, you need to be called out on this: it’s patent nonsense.
Kirby and others were very clear at the time that writing credit was an issue. Wood quit over it in 1965. Ditko quit the same year because Lee wasn’t speaking to him; Lee wasn’t speaking to Ditko because he’d demanded and received plotting credit. In 1968 Kirby told Excelsior that what kept him from writing the dialogue on the books he wrote was Lee’s editorial policy. Finally in 1970, Kirby quit Stan Lee over the issue of writing credit and pay for the writing he always did.
In another caption in the interview, you make sure to refer to “penciler Jack Kirby” (where you actually credit Stan Lee with writing a story featuring Easter Island, like Thor a repeating Kirby theme). Aside from appropriating the writing page rate, the worst lie Lee ever told about Kirby was (by design) always insisting he was just an artist. Kirby was a creator/writer/artist, and deserves to be recognized as such in your little off-hand editorials.
Lee is treated as the victor and history is molded to his narrative: he’s given every opportunity to say he doesn’t remember an event and therefore it didn’t happen. The best way to uncover the true story of Lee’s working relationship with Kirby is to take one of Kirby’s many interviews (so far dating back to 1968) and ask the question, what if I took Kirby at his word instead of Lee? A good place to start is one with which you’re obviously familiar, the interview in The Comics Journal #134. It was by no means his first word on the subject (as you characterize it), yet it provides a precious raw piece of unmanufactured history.
Ask yourself, what events would explain Kirby’s recollection of Lee crying in the office? Mike Vassallo did precisely that and figured out that according to job numbers, Kirby’s very first trip to the office in 1958 was the first working day after Joe Maneely died. That should cause you to wonder if plummeting sales on the monster books had Goodman considering closing up shop (in fact, moving out the furniture) in 1961, before giving Kirby’s superhero advice a shot.
In your response to Jon Cooke for his Comic Book Creator #1 article, you accused Kirby of delusions of grandeur for supposedly greedily wanting credit after the fact (and not remembering the “little people” like Lee who enabled his rise). No, Roy, the grandeur is genuine: you just have the roles reversed.
Michael Hill
[Thomas’ “delusions of grandeur” letter to Comic Book Creator is here, and Cooke’s gracious but firm response is here.]
Responses
Thomas’ response to me is here in full, and inline below in my response to him.
Hi Roy,
I’m disappointed. You’ve responded to my facts with a series of falsehoods, a lot of them manufactured by you. I know this is to be expected, because, following in Lee’s footsteps, you’re addressing the people who will believe you no matter what you tell them.
Thomas: Lessee… first off, both Will Murray and I were simply trying to see what (if anything) we could prod Stan into remembering about “Fin Fang Foom,” a monster story notorious mostly for its title. Neither of us was successful, but we had no nefarious motives as you suggest.
The nefarious motive in your case was the need to erase doubt raised by Kirby about who actually wrote his monster stories. Lee wasn’t a very good witness, telling you that your memory of it was better than his, even though you weren’t there. Murray, like many people, just seems to want to believe what he was told by Lee.
I’ve already covered the instances of trying to “prod Stan into remembering,” so this time let’s just look at Lee’s responses. To Murray, “I did that one. If my name was on them, I did. I never put my name on anything that I didn’t write.” [Lee’s name wasn’t on it (he hadn’t signed Fin Fang Foom), and Kirby’s penciled lettering is in the balloons.]
The caption that compelled me to write begins, “Stan suspects he may have written the entirety of the infamous giant-monster yarn ‘Fin Fang Foom’…”
His response to you about writing Kirby’s monster stories: “You know something, Roy? Now that you say it, it’s probably true; but I had never thought of that. I thought that I started it with the Fantastic Four, but you’re probably right.”
Thomas: In days since, by the way, Stan has convincingly staked his claim to that yarn, thank you very much. He revealed at a 2005 recording session in Hollywood (for a book we were both working on), with no prompting whatever from Yours Truly, who was there, or from the two non-comics people present, that he’d named “Fin Fang Foom” after the rhythm of the title of a [1934 British] movie called Chu Chin Chow. No, that doesn’t prove he plotted “Foom,”…
…nor does it prove that he did anything other than name the monster. Nobody disputes Lee’s claim to the names of the monsters. “Convincingly staking his claim” for plotting and writing “in its entirety” requires more than his suspicion, belief, even his word that he did something, especially when he contradicts the material evidence. Explain to me again, Roy, why Lee didn’t sign a single Kirby monster story, ever, and yet he signed this…
Signed.
Thomas: …it’s well known that, circa 1961, he wrote synopses for most if not all of Timely/Marvel’s “monster epics,” which his brother Larry Lieber (and perhaps occasionally others) then turned into full scripts to be drawn by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, et al.
This statement is false. It’s well known among your readers, Roy, because you began spreading this origin story in 1998 (quoted in my original letter): while crediting Lee with writing the monster stories, you slipped in the phrase, “along with Larry Lieber.” Based on the actual evidence, the published works and the original art pages that have surfaced, it’s not true.
Will Murray’s “Vandoom” article was revised and reprinted in TJKC #77. In its original 1984 form, the article credits Lee with writing Marvel style, as you did in 1998. Wouldn’t being “written” Marvel-style obviate the need for a Lieber script?
Murray, 1984: “Then Jack Kirby wandered over from DC… Stan Lee never showed this kind of imagination in his pre-1959 scripts, so I would guess it was Kirby, whose mother was born near Transylvania and told him some pretty wild legends when he was a kid, on whose doorstep we can lay the credit—or blame.”
“Lee-Kirby epic… Lee and Kirby developed… always a Stan Lee moral at the end… Lee/Kirby monster story…”
It’s unclear what Lee did in this collaboration, until..
“I also have to feel sorry for Stan Lee. I’m sure his artists helped create the monsters (this seems to be when he first started plotting ‘Marvel-style’), but he had to name them.”
By the time of the 2019 rewrite, the ’80s Lee-as-writer narrative had been supplanted.
Murray, 2019: “By the beginning of 1960, Stan Lee had weeded out the also-rans from his stable, trained a small group of replacements to work from his plots and brother Larry Lieber’s scripts, and established a new house look to his four surviving fantasy titles…”
“Lieber is the unsung hero of the monster era. When Lee had to let go of his staff scripters in 1958, he brought in younger brother Larry and trained him to write monster stories.”
The credits were introduced in 1962. Lieber was added to the scenario following an interview he did with Murray in 1995. I’d be grateful, Roy, if you could direct me to a mention of Lieber scripting for Kirby that predates Kirby’s TCJ interview, or more significantly, his death. After he died, Kirby wasn’t around to contest Lieber’s claim.
Thomas: Now, if Jack himself said at some point that he wrote that story, dialogue and all, that would definitely be worth considering. But traces of his penciled balloons and captions on original “Foom” art merely indicate he pencil-lettered it when he drew it, not that he’d written the original script.
“If Jack himself said at some point,” it would be dismissed like everything else Jack himself said because it couldn’t co-exist with what Lee and Thomas have been saying.
In fact, Kirby himself did comment… GROTH: When you went to Marvel in ’58 and ’59, Stan was obviously there.
KIRBY: Yes, and he was the same way [a pest].
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 [monster] stories just like I always did. Jack Kirby interviewed by Gary Groth, conducted in summer of 1989, The Comics Journal #134, February 1990.
Roy, you told Lee he “probably didn’t write full scripts for Jack for Fin Fang Foom.” You told Jon Cooke (see letter to Comic Book Creator, above) “Larry wrote a full script for the origin of Ant-Man (and probably ‘The Man in the Ant-Hill,’ earlier),” then you used the phrase, “ fully scripted by Lee and Lieber.” What is the physical evidence for scripts by Lee or Lieber? Have you ever seen a full script by Lee?
Will Murray interviewed Daniel Keyes, one of Lee’s editors between 1952 and 1955, for Alter Ego #13. Keyes described the process of vetting scripts of freelance writers for Lee; later, Murray asked him about Lee’s writing.
MURRAY: Stan Lee is today considered one of the great comic book writers. Was he writing many comics in those days?
KEYES: Not to my knowledge. He edited, I guess. He was a businessman, as far as I was concerned. And a shy businessman is almost an oxymoron. I’ve never thought of Stan as a writer at all. So that surprises me. Of course, he might have been turning in comics for a few extra bucks, doing it under pen names so that Martin Goodman wouldn’t know about it. I never thought of Stan as a writer. Daniel Keyes interviewed by Will Murray, Alter Ego #13, March 2002.
Thomas: It may well be true, as you say, that Jack would’ve preferred to write the actual scripts to some (if not all) of the stories he and Stan did. If so, it doesn’t seem he often (if ever) broached that subject to Stan, or I’d have probably heard about it in 1965 or after. But I won’t deny that, as the editor, responsible to publisher Martin Goodman for the contents of the comics, Stan really never felt that Jack’s dialogue would deliver what he wanted in a Marvel comic. Rightly or wrongly (and I submit he was basically correct), Stan believed his own way of scripting Marvel’s comics was every bit as important as the art during that first Marvel decade… and he wanted to keep that winning combination going. Not in order to rob Jack of credit, but because the system was working—had worked, indeed, from the first issue of Fantastic Four—and he didn’t want to mess it up.
Q: Who created the Inhumans, you or Stan Lee?
JACK: I did.
Q: Do you plot the Fantastic Four stories by drawing the basic story and then having Stan write the dialogue?
JACK: This is Stanley’s editorial policy. As a Marvel artist, I carry it out Excelsior #1, 1968.
KIRBY: I’ll tell you from a professional point of view. I was writing them. I was drawing them.
EISNER: But you do not necessarily subscribe to the idea of someone else, regardless of who it is, putting balloons in on a completely penciled page. I have a prejudice on it but I want to get your opinion.
KIRBY: My opinion is this: Stan Lee wrote the credits. I never wrote the credits. Shop Talk, Jack Kirby interviewed by Will Eisner, Will Eisner‘s Spirit Magazine #39, July 1982.
Darrell Epp, Jack Kirby and Kompany group, 15 January 2020: the mob has been wrong before, it has happened, so what do you think: look at the stuff kirby wrote before 60’s marvel and after 60’s marvel and try to compare the maturity/complexity of the writing…. and saying ‘the writers at dc lacked that kind of breadth’ compared to lee’s writing is tricky, because, what did lee ever write, without the genius of kirby or ditko to sponge off of lamprey-style? millie the model? ravage 2099? and yes, kirby’s writing could have been problematic for many readers because it operated at a higher level of sophistication than they were used to, it’s just brimming with literary illusions, HARD WON truths from a veteran who saw the darkest corners of the human experience up close, man! i’m so grateful….
Here’s an excerpt from Chris Tolworthy’s epic dissection of FF #51:
PART 3: LEE WAS EDITOR, NOT PLOTTER
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.
We are lucky to get two accidental glimpses into a story meeting around this time: one just before, one just after. For FF48, Roy Thomas accidentally walked in on a meeting and famously reported the “who’s that guy?” quote. Lee knew nothing about the Silver Surfer until he saw him. Then for FF 55, Lee put on a fake meeting for a reporter, and Lee’s comment shows he had no idea what was in the comic (being unaware of the ongoing Klaw plot, and thinking the Surfer whose whole story was being trapped on Earth, was “somewhere off in space”). So the default assumption must be that, barring other evidence, Lee did not plot the stories at all. He was an editor: he edited stories after they arrived.
PART 4: LEE’S MOST FAMOUS EDIT
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.
Sue restrained, or “Reed, do something!”?
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. I’ll look at that next, and then how it changes FF51.
Thomas: Sure, he let Wally Wood dialogue a single Daredevil issue; but he was unhappy with the results (as I learned when I came to work there, soon after Wood quit). I can appreciate Wood’s being unhappy to be acknowledged only as the “artist” in the credits, so that he moved on—but Stan was so obviously enamored of Wood’s talent that, if Wood had really pushed the point, Stan might well have made the same type of arrangement with him that he’d done first with Ditko, then with Kirby.
Arrangement? You seem to believe that any arrangement with Ditko and Kirby was acceptable to Ditko and Kirby at the time.
Wally Wood was writing Daredevil from the start and simply wanted writing credit.
WW: I enjoyed working with Stan on DAREDEVIL but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing and I was being paid for drawing but he didn’t have any ideas. I’d go in for a plotting session and we’d just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. I felt that I was writing the book but not being paid for writing.
ME: You did write one issue, as I recall…
WW: One, yes. I persuaded him to let me write one by myself since I was doing 99% of the writing already. I wrote it, handed it in and he said it was hopeless. He said he’d have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself. Well, I said I couldn’t contribute to the storyline unless I got paid something for writing and Stan said he’d look into it, but after that he only had inking for me. Bob Powell was suddenly pencilling DAREDEVIL. Excerpts from Mark Evanier’s interview with Wallace Wood, Kirby-L, the Jack Kirby Internet mailing list, 5 July 1997. (Now published in Fantagraphics’ The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood.)
Thomas: As for your statement that “Ditko quit… because Stan wasn’t speaking to him”… well, maybe that’s the reason, and maybe it wasn’t. Do you have a quote from Steve specifically stating that? Because Steve had other, and, he felt, better reasons for leaving, I’m sure… and in any event, he went on working for Marvel for a year or so after the two men stopped speaking.
Ditko was forthcoming and transparent: he wrote impassioned essays in Robin Snyder’s The Comics, including a 15+-part Mini History of Marvel, the 2008 32-pager, Avenging Mind, focused on Marvel, Lee, and Goodman, and “WHY I QUIT S-M, MARVEL” in Four Page Series No. 9, September 2015.
Roy, I exaggerated in my letter when I called Lee your only source. You told Jim Amash that your take on who created characters was based on speaking strictly to Lee and Brodsky. Your version of what took place before your arrival is only informed by Lee, Lieber, and other Marvel employees. People like Lieber, Romita, and Brodsky, who rarely encountered Kirby in person, simply repeated what Lee told them, so Lee was the ultimate source. The 1998 Comic Book Artist #2 “interview” seems to indicate that Brodsky and Lieber hadn’t yet told you about the monster stories. Who were your sources of information at that point? Earlier?
Thomas: Nor do I necessarily accept that Jack quit Marvel in 1970 specifically “over the issue of writing credit and pay for the writing he always did.” I’m not saying it may not have been a factor. Still, during the preceding decade, he’d received several pay raises—and while they were officially for his work as “artist,” that doesn’t mean that Stan, who was pushing the publisher to get him those raises, didn’t personally count Jack’s plotting/storytelling input as partial justification for them, even if Jack didn’t see it that way.
Lee had a lot to say about Goodman’s promises, to himself and to Kirby and Ditko. Ultimately he said this:
“As far as what they were paid, I had nothing to do with that. They were hired as freelance artists, and they worked as freelance artists. At some point they apparently felt they should be getting more money. Fine, it was up to them to talk to the publisher. It had nothing to do with me. I would have liked to have gotten more money too. I never made an issue of it. I got paid per page for what I wrote, the same rate as the other writers—maybe a dollar a page more. “I don’t want anyone to think I treated Kirby or Ditko unfairly. I think we had a wonderful relationship. Their talent was incredible. But the things they wanted weren’t in my power to give them.” Stan Lee interviewed by David Hochman, Playboy, April 2014.
Kirby quit after years of having his writing pay stolen. It’s not a mystery, even though Lee made out for decades that he didn’t know why. Now Roy Thomas has taken up the mantle.
Thomas: But Stan felt that he himself needed to provide the actual finished dialogue for the stories. When Jack dialogued a “S.H.I.E.L.D.” episode while Stan was out of town, Stan, upon returning, was vocally unhappy with the dialogue (if then-production manager Sol Brodsky was still alive, he’d back me up on this) and hurriedly rewrote as much of it as he had time to do… and far more than poor, long-suffering, deadline-hounded, budget-conscious Sol wanted him to. and from the caption, Roy T. recalls The Man as actually doing extensive rewrites upon his return; in the end, he just didn’t want to take credit or blame for his part in a story whose writing he didn’t much care for. Surprisingly, it’s unusually difficult to detect the rewritten balloons and captions, which suggests that production manager Sol Brodsky may have called credited letterer Sam Rosen into the Marvel offices to handle Stan’s re-do. Or maybe Sol talked Stan out of doing quite as much rewriting as Roy knows he wanted.
How conveniently worded: “if the evidence doesn’t bear out my ‘recollection,’ I’ll say Sol talked him out of it.” Vocally unhappy? Let’s take a look at the evidence…
Jim MacKay, Marvel Method group, 15 December 2019: Artie Simek did the [front page] bottom caption and credits, and relettered a few word balloons elsewhere in the story. If that was Stan Lee’s contribution when he returned from vacation, it amounted to 1 or 2 percent of the dialogue. Certainly not “extensive rewriting.”
“SAM ROSEN” lettered by Artie Simek.
Don’t take Jim MacKay’s word for it… the pages of the SHIELD story can be viewed online.
Lee’s contribution to this panel: “SAWBONES.”
WW: But remember that issue of DAREDEVIL I wrote? Stan said it was hopeless and that he’d have to rewrite the whole thing. Then I saw it when it came out and he’d changed five words, less than an editor usually changes. I think that was the last straw. Mark Evanier’s interview with Wallace Wood, Kirby-L, the Jack Kirby Internet mailing list, 5 July 1997. (Now published in Fantagraphics’ The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood.)
Thomas: In 1970 Stan let Jack dialogue the “Ka-Zar” and “Inhumans” 10-pagers, because he didn’t have time to write the script himself and he knew Jack didn’t want to work with any other Marvel scribes; in his own mind, Stan was mostly just trying to keep Jack happy—though it was clearly too late for that.
Too late for awarding the writing pay? Yes, by 1970 it was too late. Why don’t we say it was already too late when, as Kirby put it, Lee noticed Kirby was taking home a bigger paycheque, and Kirby was forced to “render unto Caesar”?
Thomas: In the mid-1960s, Stan was desperately looking for writers. If not, he’d never have hired, in short order in 1965, first Steve Skeates, then myself, then Denny O’Neil. If he’d felt Kirby or Wood could’ve delivered the kind of scripting he wanted, I’m dead certain he’d have found a way to utilize them in that capacity. (Admittedly, in Jack’s case, I’m sure he’d have been torn, because he wanted Jack to pencil as much as possible—and writing scripts, like inking, would’ve made him less productive in the area wherein Stan primarily valued him. But the fact remains: rightly or wrongly, he just didn’t care for Jack’s actual dialogue-writing, only his plotting and storytelling.)
Definitions: Kirby was writing, Lee was adding dialogue based on Kirby’s margin notes.
Less productive? According to Mark Evanier, Kirby’s solo work breakdown was the same as when Lee “collaborated”: Kirby wrote and penciled a complete story, then added dialogue and captions. The difference was that instead of writing dialogue in the balloons, Kirby wrote margin notes for Lee. How would writing his own dialogue be less productive?
If you’re honest, Roy, I think you’d agree that Kirby explaining the story to Lee in margin notes would be more time-consuming than Kirby simply finishing the story he’d already written. The results were disastrous, with Lee seemingly taking the margin notes as dialogue suggestions and having the dialogue explain what was visibly obvious. Also evident was the fact that Lee frequently didn’t know what was happening in the story. No, the purpose of taking away Kirby’s ability to dialogue his own story was to give Lee the writing page rate on stories that came to him pre-written.
When Kirby did layouts, he was writing the story for a fraction of the penciling pay. The penciler took a pay cut, and Lee’s page rate was unaffected. When Ditko got plotting credit, Lee took the pay cut.
“only his plotting and storytelling”: this is amusing because Lee never credited Kirby in the credit boxes with plotting, thus Kirby was never paid for it.
Lee “didn’t care for” Kirby’s dialogue because his reading level was lower than Kirby was used to writing. Joan told him to write the kind of stories he himself would want to read, and for that he needed to dumb down Kirby’s work. See Chris Tolworthy, above.
Thomas: Should Stan perhaps have made some additional accommodation with Jack? The point can be argued—in retrospect, I wish he had—but remember, Stan had reason to believe the matter had been settled to Jack’s satisfaction when the two of them agreed that future stories would be credited as “a Stan Lee & Jack Kirby production,” the phrasing Jack reportedly chose himself. I don’t recall ever hearing that Jack broached a further complaint in that area—at least not to his face, which is basically all that counts; if Jack didn’t bring it up, Stan can’t be faulted for not reading his mind. Stan thought things were back on an even keel—right up to the day he received that fateful phone call from Jack telling him that he was quitting and indeed had already begun working on new projects for DC. Yes, there was definitely a failure to communicate—and it’s a real pity that there was—but it was a two-way street.
No mind-reading was necessary. Lee was stealing from Kirby and Kirby knew it. Lee should simply have made some “additional accomodation” to not steal.
“Auntie Goose Rhymes,” Not Brand Ecch #11, December 1968.
Kirby’s imminent departure seemed to be common knowledge around the Marvel offices as early as 1968. In a story in Not Brand Echh, John Verpoorten drew a gag note pinned to the bulletin board next to Kirby’s drawing board. It reads, “All is forgiven,” and is signed Carmine. The writer is listed as… Roy Thomas.
Kirby made it clear to you in the ’70s, Roy, that the Marvel Method was an unsatisfactory working arrangement on the FF. You still seem (or pretend to be) mystified, but even Danny Fingeroth pegged it in A Marvelous Life: “Kirby had no intention of plotting stories for someone else to dialogue.” (p 261)
Thomas: One further point: While Jack’s experience briefly drawing The Double Life of Private Strong and The Fly for Archie might indicate to some that Jack was always pushing Stan to do super-heroes, don’t forget that it was more likely Joe Simon as editor who initiated the idea of doing such characters to the Archie people.
I won’t dispute here that it was Simon’s idea; that’s not part of this discussion. I understand your need to strip the credit from Kirby for even the creating and writing he’d done at S&K lest he be perceived as someone who came to Lee as a successful creator and writer. Kirby was recommending superheroes based on his own experience of the success of work he was doing for other companies, while he was selling monster stories to Lee.
Thomas: Contrary to what you write, Stan didn’t think of Jack as “just an artist.” There are numerous references in the 1960s Bullpen Bulletins and elsewhere to Kirby’s contributions to story, including at least once or twice the bald statement that Jack would draw entire issues after just the briefest of story conferences.
Lee didn’t “think” of Kirby as “just an artist,” but he never credited him with anything more than art in published credits other than “This Is A Plot?” until the very end (the two writing credits you mentioned). He was “just an artist” in every way that mattered to him. Ditko got a plotting credit. Lee got plotting credits on many books where it’s clear that Kirby did the plotting (Strange Tales #103, Tales of Suspense #39, for just two examples). Lee’s neighbour’s kids got a plotting credit (Strange Tales #116). Letter writers got plotting credits. Jack Kirby, the primary plotter of the Marvel Universe, never got a plotting credit. Kirby was never given credit by Lee in a way that could be monetized: Lee paid lip service to plotting and creativity, but always took the money by taking the writing or plotting credit. When Ditko demanded and received a plotting credit, it ate into Lee’s page rate and Lee stopped speaking to Ditko.
Not just anyone qualified for a plotting credit.
Thomas: The “crying time” episode Jack recounted in the late ’80s may indeed have come about very much as Doc Vassallo postulates—i.e., less because sales were down (whatever the state of the office furniture) than because Stan’s artist friend Joe Maneely had died only a couple of days before. Small wonder Stan didn’t recall the episode as Jack did: his motivation for any tears, whether gushing or stifled, might well have been largely different from what Jack assumed.
Kirby told the story to Leonard Pitts, Jr in 1985, Ben Schwartz of the UCLA Daily Bruin in 1987, and Gary Groth in 1989.
Steve Sherman has recently shed some new light on this description of Kirby’s: ‘The thing is, if Joe Maneely hadn’t died, things would have been a lot different. I guess you can call it fate, destiny, random events, but Jack probably would have found something else. Yes it was early ’61 that Goodman was going to pull the plug. Don’t forget, the Marvel offices at the time were pretty small, so it wasn’t a big deal to close the office. I would guess that Goodman had not yet informed the printer or engravers, since that would have been bought ahead of time. I would guess that last issues of the books had been sent out. Jack couldn’t let them close. Jack had always been working on ideas for books. He was pretty well aware of what was being published. He always felt that “superhero” books would make a comeback. Since Goodman already had the pipeline going, it wasn’t too much to give it another shot, especially since it was Jack. He had come through before, so why not. As Jack told me, he came up with all of the titles at once. He called it a “blitzkrieg”. He felt if he put out a bunch of new books at once, it would make a splash. He had “FF”, “Spider-Man”, “The X-Men” and “Thor” and “Hulk”. You can believe it or not, but that’s what he told me.’ Steve Sherman by email to Patrick Ford, 2018.
Patrick Ford, Marvel Method group, 7 January 2020: JL Mast has a business document dated June 16, 1958 which indicates that Martin Goodman planned to shutter his comic book publishing division. June 1958 happens to coincide with the death of Joe Maneely and Jack Kirby beginning to sell freelance material to Goodman. Examining Marvel’s publishing record there is a 38 day gap between July 25th and September 2nd where nothing was published. On Sept. 2nd three new science fiction titles were introduced and Sept. 2nd also happens to be the month where Jack Kirby’s work began showing up in the science fiction titles. He did three of the four covers and had his first story published. The nearly six week long interruption may be further evidence that Goodman did intend to pull the plug.
Michael J. Vassallo: …this exact period is the most critical moment in Marvel’s 80 year history. Atlas implosion in April of 1957, inventory runs out, declining sales (assumed), and on June 7, 1958 Joe Maneely dies. It was the company’s nadir and I’m sure Goodman had had enough. There was enough profit in his men’s sweat magazines (a genre he actually pioneered, rather than copied). So what happens next is the lynchpin to what came afterward. Immediately (and I mean days) new sci-fi titles were launched. What corresponds with that launch? Jack Kirby returns. Do you actually think Stan suggested new sci-fi titles? He had never written any! Do you actually think Martin Goodman suggested new sci-fi titles? Goodman hated science fiction. It never sold for him. Not in the pulps, not in the comic books. The sales pitch had to come from Jack and the decision to green-light it was made immediately, based on job numbers. The original sales pitch may even have been for super heroes, and Goodman resisted, but at the very least it was science fantasy and Goodman relented. So the line chugs on for another 2 years as sci-fi becomes monster stories, westerns, romance and some new war stories appear and humor continues unabated (which were probably the best sellers). Then the second critical juncture occurs and with declining sales Kirby probably shows up with his blitzkrieg proposal for new superhero titles and Goodman finally relents The first series was a super-powered version of what he already did, the Challengers of the Unknown. THAT is the most likely scenario of how Marvel re-launched. No wife telling Stan to do comics “his” way, no golf game, no spider-on-the-wall, no Chondu the magician, no…
Patrick Ford: Michael, There is some evidence that Kirby’s pitch was for super heroes. In several different interviews (as early as 1969) he said he was pushing for the super hero. He said in 1969 that he “kept harping on” trying superheroes while doing the monster stories. Later he told Will Eisner he had to “fight for the super hero” titles. I think he came in pushing the idea and Goodman didn’t want to go with it due to the poor reaction to the Timely hero revival. Kirby was also doing science fiction and monster stories at the time for Crestwood, National and Harvey and my guess is he also pushed for those with Goodman jumping on the “giant monster” genre which was popular at the time in film and comic books.
Michael J. Vassallo: Back to what I said above, there are 2 lines of history now. There’s the “official” history nearly 100% based on what Stan has told starting in the 1970’s. Then there’s Jack’s history, told in numerous interviews. Of the 2, only Jack’s is backed by a deep look at the actual books, the actual history of the time period, and the back history of both. Jack’s story can be backed with data and evidence. Stan’s cannot. Stan’s back history tells us nothing. His recollection of the critical junctures are negligible. His forward story is made up and cannot be corroborated. Jack’s back story is really all you need to see which history is correct. His interviews just corroborate what he was saying.
So if the incident as Kirby described it happened in 1958 or 1961, yes, there was a corresponding shutdown.
Thomas: Nor is it likely that it was Jack’s supposed predilection for super-heroes that led to Timely reviving them (more than two years after the crying/furniture event Jack refers to). Not only Stan’s own various accounts, but also the 1960 success of DC’s new Justice League of America and related comics, gives credence to the greater likelihood that the 1961 Timely super-hero title was developed at the behest of the *publisher*. There’s no proof—and not really much probability—that Stan ever even mentioned to Martin Goodman that Jack Kirby thought the company ought to try putting out super-heroes again. If Jack felt it should, he was clearly correct, but that doesn’t mean his wishes had any more effect on Goodman than my own fannish musings, from nearly a thousand miles away. That wasn’t the way Goodman (or Stan Lee) operated, and I submit that it’s willfully naïve to believe it was.
Roy, “Stan’s own various accounts,” as well as your own, were introduced to the world after the purchase of Marvel by Perfect Film & Chemical. Some were introduced in 1998 or later. “Willfully naïve” describes Will Murray wanting Lee to be telling the truth, but you’re just willfully misleading because you know more of the truth.
John Morrow in Stuf’ Said: When Pitts next interviews Stan, he mentions Jack’s story about saving Marvel from closing down, and finding Stan crying: “Well, that’s his remembrance. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I’ve had my head on the desk crying. You’re meeting me now, I don’t think I come across as an emotional wreck. I really don’t know what he’s alluding to at all.” I’m objecting again here, as Lee isn’t fully addressing the issue. He’s completely avoiding any discussion of whether Marvel was about to close when Kirby arrived, and only focusing on the “crying” comment.
As for the success of the Justice League, Kirby’s Challengers predated the JLA in the superhero revival by three years, and even without Kirby, was outselling JLA’s Brave and the Bold in 1960, when the JLA would have been around for Goodman to notice. The first JLA cover “paid homage” to Kirby’s Showcase #12 Challengers cover. Goodman was probably aware of the success of Challengers, and had seen DC themselves imitate Challengers with Suicide Squad, Sea Devils, and the JLA. He was nudged into action by Kirby’s presentation, after he’d actually pulled the plug on the comics division (for the second or third time?); his renowned knowledge of the market may have determined which of Kirby’s concepts to audition first. The JLA story is a smokescreen developed post 1968 to disguise the obvious source of PF&C’s newly-purchased intellectual property.
Thomas: As for your final insult, aimed at Stan and/or myself—well, I left it in, because I wanted to remind readers (and myself) that being a fan of a particular comics talent can be carried so far as to become almost a vice. As for myself—well, I’ve been a fan of Jack Kirby since probably you were less than a gleam in your father’s (if not your grandfather’s) eye, so I hardly need certification in your eyes as what I indeed am: a great and lifetime admirer of both men. I’ve written more than once that I find it impossible to imagine Marvel Comics as it ultimately evolved without the two of them being on the scene at the time, with each doing basically what he did. If you feel differently… well, I know a good eye specialist I could recommend.
Roy, you’ve been a fan for a long time, but given the ability to look at both men’s claims in light of the evidence in the work itself, it becomes clear that you’re just making stuff up. Your unique perspective on the man is not unlike Kirby’s: you knew him before his Cadence makeover, when the industry considered him a buffoon; you saw his vindictive side (the one he showed to Kirby, Ditko, Wood, Ayers, and others). Kirby used satire to show us truth about Lee, but your goal is to suppress that truth and erase Kirby’s accomplishments. Being a Kirby fan can be “almost a vice”? I would suggest that you’re leading a Lee cult, complete with false doctrine. Simply pointing out the existence of accounts other than Lee’s is treated as heresy.
Addendum
More thoughts on Fin Fang Foom…
Chris Tolworthy, Marvel Method group, 19 January 2020: This topic (Fin Fang Foom) fascinates me, because it gets to the heart of Lee’s claims, in a number of ways:
1. Deep versus shallow. If the stories are shallow, then Lee might have a claim: he had a history of shallow stories. But the stories are not shallow, so “this silly name sounds the same” is no evidence.
2. Misdirection. Lee’s claims rely on half remembered maybes. Roy Thomas uses the same method when referring to the Chu Chin Chow claim. He admits that it is not proof, but for proof he refers to the “everybody knows” argument. And the “everybody knows” argument turns out to be based on other non-evidence like this. In contrast, any Kirby evidence is solid and well documented.
3. Racism, sexism, etc. “Chu Chin Chow” was a name created by a westerner in the Yellow Peril era. Presumably from “Fu Manchu”, “China” and “Chow Mein”. The name celebrates ignorance. Anybody with respect for a culture would not be so lazy when naming a major character. Sadly Kirby inherited some of these names, and he needed work (e.g. Charlie Chan), but his own creations show a greater understanding and respect (e.g. the Inhumans, an obviously Asian culture, but one with more depth).
Kirby’s choice of a name retains what is authentically ancient Chinese (monosyllabic alliteration) while avoiding the ignorant racism that Lee embraces (see previous point). From Wikipedia:
Old Chinese morphemes were originally monosyllabic, but during the Western Zhou period many new bisyllabic words entered the language. For example, over 30% of the vocabulary of the Mencius is polysyllabic, including 9% proper names, though monosyllabic words occur more frequently, accounting for 80–90% of the text.[163] Many words, particularly expressive adjectives and adverbs, were formed by varieties of reduplication:[164] full reduplication, in which the syllable is repeated, as in *ʔjuj-ʔjuj (威威 wēiwēi) ‘tall and grand’ and *ljo-ljo (俞俞 yúyú) ‘happy and at ease’.[164]
rhyming semi-reduplication, in which only the final is repeated, as in *ʔiwʔ-liwʔ (窈宨 yǎotiǎo) ‘elegant, beautiful’.[165] The initial of the second syllable is often *l- or *r-.[166]
alliterative semi-reduplication, in which the initial is repeated, as in *tsʰrjum-tsʰrjaj (參差 cēncī) ‘irregular, uneven’.[165]
vowel alternation, especially of *-e- and *-o-, as in *tsʰjek-tsʰjok (刺促 qìcù) ‘busy’ and *ɡreʔ-ɡroʔ (邂逅 xièhòu) ‘carefree and happy’.[167]
As Patrick Ford has pointed out, Lee’s defences over the years appear to be schooled by legal advice. His reliance on names is a classic case. Lee cannot claim to have written the meat of the stories, as his abilities are laughable. He is simply unable to come up with a decent story on his own. HOWEVER, by talking about names he gets around that problem. If he provided the name then that inserts him into the creation process at the beginning, allowing him to claim originator status without having to claim any talent.
Talking about names has the added advantage that it does not require Lee to memorise anything. Lawyers always worry that their idiot clients will mangle or forget some vital point, so they have to make their case idiot proof. By sticking to names, Lee does not have to remember much, or even anything. When a critic asks “how did you create X” he can just riff on the name.
For examples, see his discussion of Dr Octopus, the Destroyer, or alliteration in general.
Lee’s focus on alliteration is deceptive. He likes to claim ownership of alliteration, using his alleged “poor memory” to appear plausible. But a closer examination shows that:
1. Superheroes traditionally have more alliteration, because they are showmen. Hence real life showmen like Harry Houdini, or Kirby’s acrobatic showman “Red Ryan”. We see some alliteration in DC characters for the same reason. So this is not a Stan Lee thing.
(Edit: for Lois Lane, think movie stars Greta Garbot, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert)
2. The 1960s characters (that Lee claims) are not unusually alliterative in this context. Yes there are some (Peter Parker, Reed Richards), but far more of them are not: Johnny Clay (the Rawhide Kid), Anthony Druid, Hank Pym, Ben Grimm (the original star of the FF). Thor, Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Charles Xavier, Natalia Romanov, etc.
So alliteration is not evidence of Lee’s input. In the case of Fin Fang Foom, single syllable alliteration was simply a common feature of Old Chinese, and was one of the first thing that westerners noticed. As usual Lee tries to take ownership of something he did not create.
The post-Kirby Fin Fang Foom is the poster child for what Makes Marvel into Marvel. Fake knowledge. This is what attracted me to Marvel as a child, and what repels me now: Marvel claims to have depth, morality, maturity, continuity, fully realised characters, etc. and in fact has none of those things. What it DOES have is easy promises: buy a comic and be smart. Fin Fang Foom is the poster child because he offers instant cleverness: by remembering that hard-to-forget name, a child can act like he has knowledge of the pre-hero monster era. As an added bonus he can act like he is super cool because he embraces irony and can laugh at himself. Yet in 99 percent of cases the fan has not even read the story, let alone understood its references.
Lee embraced that and celebrated fan ignorance masquerading as brilliance. He was the arch fake, who also barely read the stories, yet used them to claim that he was clever. This approach only works if you either don’t care about good stories (the fans), or if you do, and therefore avoid Stan Lee’s works (most readers, including most lawyers). That is, it relies on NOT READING THE STORIES or reading them in a superficial way, knowing nothing of the source material or references. As long as there are legions of the young and uninformed, as long as a proportion of these wants to stay uninformed, Marvel has a market. And the last thing they want to do is be exposed as frauds (especially those who make a living from the industry) so they will support Lee in any way possible.
The solution to the “who did what” question is to actually read the stories. And here is another Marvel master stroke. Flood the market with so many stories that nobody spends more than five minutes on each one. So nobody reads, and everybody thinks they are a great reader. Nobody can tell a good story from a bad one. Never mind the quality, feel the weight.
The quality of this story is definitely the proof. It angers me that this is remembered just as the silly name story. No, it is a beautiful and profound story. A story of passive quiet learning defeating loud and strong barbarians. It is quintessentially Chinese: the young son with his great respect for the past defeats the foreigners.
Note that this is actually based on Formosa (Taiwan) and is about Taiwan defending itself against mainland China. While the older brother tries to defeat them with his gun, and while brave he is doomed to failure. The younger brother instead studies the old ways and gains strength from the wisdom of the ages. The message, repeated at the start and end of his quest, is that there is more than one way to wage war. Some do it with the sword, others with knowledge.
“Let China sleep, for when she wakes up, she will shake the world.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
The idea of the sleeping power is as old as the hills (hills that in many parts of the world are taken as sleeping dragons). Note the start of the story, where the Formosans run from the red army, just as the hero runs from the dragon. The plot is of how he turns one foe against another, and by him running fast enough they run into each other and defeat each other. I am no expert on martial arts, but I would bet money that is a martial arts concept.
Another beautiful part is how the fleeing Formosans write the name of their legendary protector on the walls, to give themselves courage. Just as happens today and in all oppressed regions.
A famous legend of Formosa: Ban Pin Shan
“Ban Pin Shan means ‘Half-faced mountain’. It is named as its shape implies. This story tells about the virtue of integrity and the values of kindness and selflessness.”
Recall how I mentioned that in many cultures, oddly shaped mountains are thought of as sleeping dragons. In the case of Ban Pin Shan the story (at least the one I have read) does not have a dragon, but it does have the mountain god who taught the people a lesson about greed. He appeared as an old man selling delicious dumplings. he said that the dumplings were a certain price, but if a person had exactly three they could have them for nothing. So of course everybody had exactly three, and the poor generous dumpling maker was not paid a single penny. He then revealed that he was the mountain god, and they had really eaten mud from the mountain, hence the missing gap in the mountain. he was teaching them not to be greedy, not to take something for nothing just because they could.
Fin Fang Foom parallels another story of Formosa: the true story of Wushe from 1930. The Japanese had attached Formosa with overwhelming numbers and weapons, and the aboriginals had no chance of winning, despite bravery. That is like the start of Fin Fang Foom. Only one of the aboriginals had an education: a man named Mo Na Dao. So the people turned to him, just as in Kirby’s story the educated boy was the only one who could win. Mo Na Dao stood up to the Japanese, and had a great victory for a while. Although the people finally died, they did so with honour, and Mo Na Dao became a name to inspire courage, just as “Fin Fang Foom” was written on the walls.
I am not claiming that Kirby knew this or that particular legend. But he had such a broad knowledge that when he made up a story about a Chinese dragon, the story worked and felt right on every level. Including the name.
Danny Fingeroth’s Lee biography is an ambitious work, and adds some new information to the discussion. Since it’s a hagiography that pleases its target audience, it’s unreasonable to expect an impartial telling of history.
Fundamental omissions (their absence taints the history the book pretends to tell):
1 It was about the money. Kirby was not then, nor ever, allowed to be perceived as a writer, because Lee was taking the writing pay. Lee cultivated his following by convincing them that not only were they not weird for reading comics, they were smarter than readers of other comics. They were easily convinced that Lee’s teen humour dialogue was the ultimate in writing, and that Kirby wasn’t a writer. Now this belief is repeated without the need to verify it, and millions upon millions of people take it for fact without ever having read a comic dialogued by Lee.
2 Ditko and Kirby were witnesses to history. While Lee was writing the credit boxes, and when he started living up to his Cadence contract, Ditko and Kirby needed to be de-credited as well as discredited. Lee repeatedly said he didn’t know why they left (“I never did know why they left,” should always be read as, “I’m not at liberty to tell you why they left”). He responded to Kirby’s interview claims by suggesting Kirby was out of his mind. In the book and in general, contradictory statements of the two witnesses compared with the official version need to be explained away in terms of the witnesses’ own motivations.
For contesting Lee’s story, Kirby got to be labeled a heretic. People who bring up the fact that other stories exist are called “haters” (see the back cover). Kirby’s take on various events is acknowledged in the book with the admonition that he wasn’t consistent in what he said; his key testimony on critical points is simply ignored, while the credibility of Lee, Lee’s brother, and people who weren’t even there, remains unquestioned. Thus, as Lee would have wanted, some key Kirby and Ditko insights are simply absent. Roy Thomas said in his 1981 TCJ #61 interview, “I think Stan has pretty accurately outlined things, even though in hyperbolic terms, in books like the first Origins of Marvel Comics.” I would submit that Kirby’s interviews, along with Ditko’s Mini-History, tell a more accurate history of ‘60s Marvel.
Just a nice guy
Page 52: “affable, propeller-beanie-wearing… Perhaps Lee/Lieber hadn’t yet learned how to charm reporters.”
78: “Lee’s natural inclination to be friendly and welcoming”
Lee is portrayed as the man who got along with everyone, and Kirby and Ditko are the difficult ones. Fingeroth details the tragedy of Carl Burgos’ destruction of his life’s work in comics at his own hand (pp 165-6); Burgos blamed Lee. Wallace Wood and his “angry departure” are mentioned (155), but not Alex Toth, or Joe Orlando. Dick Ayers, in his graphical autobiography, revealed being smeared to the competition by the rumour of a nervous breakdown; Ayers blamed Lee. Herb Trimpe told us that when he was unceremoniously terminated by Marvel, he needed to sign away his right to badmouth Lee or the company in order to receive retirement benefits.
What is lost in Marvelous Life is the experience of Harvey and Adele Kurtzman (42), who in the ’40s and ‘50s knew Lee lorded it over his employees. Lost are the assessments of Al Jaffee and Gerry Conway, that Lee, although the master at being a pal to his readers, was socially awkward with, even (unintentionally?) cruel to his employees. Heart-warming Al Jaffee stories are included, but the circumstances of Jaffee’s departure are omitted. Mentioned is Joe Simon’s 1966 “The New Age of Comics” (161), but left out is a Joe Orlando-edited Angel and the Ape story (1968): they both portrayed Lee as the one who signed his name to other people’s work. The Dean Latimer review of the 1971 Carnegie Hall show is quoted, but not its portrayal of Lee as someone who spoke in superlatives while saying nothing.
Wood’s experience distills Kirby’s Marvel Method decade, and Ditko’s half decade, to a matter of months. On the cover of his first Marvel book he was touted like no other talent; he was plotting from the start, and made it clear to Lee that he wasn’t going to continue doing the writing while Lee took the writing pay. After finally being credited for writing, Wood was demoted to inker, and quit. In the credits and letters pages, he was then taunted like no other (except maybe Ditko, whom Lee called “the genius of the world” and “eccentric” after his departure). On 5 September 1978, John Hitchcock received a postcard from Wood that said, “I want the credit (and the money) for everything I do! And I resent guys like Stan Lee more than I can say! He’s my one reason for living… I want to see that no-talent bum get his…”
Roy Thomas: The thing that was truest in that (earlier TCJ) article was the analysis that Marvel has had a tendency in recent years to be very vindictive toward people who leave it to work for the competition. They go far beyond any kind of professional reaction. Stan generally has reasonably good and humane instincts, but once in a while he’ll just decide that if somebody does something, he’s never going to work for Marvel again. He did this with Len, and with Gerry, though to date he’s never said it about me. Roy Thomas, interviewed by Rob Gustaveson, The Comics Journal #61, Winter Special 1981.
263: “Unlike Kirby and Ditko, [Romita and Buscema] seemed to enjoy their association with Lee and to admire and respect him…” Romita and Buscema knew what they were getting into because the Marvel Method was already established by the time they were first subjected to it. Neither was a creator/writer like Ditko and Kirby, thus they weren’t submitting their creations and writing to have Lee to appropriate the credit.
BUSCEMA: Did I work at Marvel? I mean, I’m hearing stories I never heard. I don’t recall Stan jumping or dancing because we worked over the phone.
ROMITA: And you used to love the plots right?
BUSCEMA: I hated it. Marvel Bullpen Reunion 2001, SDCC interview by Mark Evanier, Alter Ego #16, June 2002.
77: “There were rumors of ‘pay-to-play’ editorial kickbacks [at National] and elsewhere.”
90: “Before he’d burned his bridges at DC and returned to Timely, Kirby…”
The second statement needs elaboration. Kirby’s “falling out” at DC was over editor Schiff extorting an increased percentage on Sky Masters by threatening to withhold DC assignments. (Schiff’s eloquent gestures might be characterized these days as a “perfect” discussion.) Make no mistake, the Marvel Method was a kickback of the writing pay, which Lee’s “artists” relinquished after writing the story in order to receive further assignments. The book portrays Kirby as the difficult one because he chose to leave abusive relationships with people who were stealing from him. The men who paid Lee’s kickback did so, not because he was such an affable, welcoming guy or a great accumulator of talent, but because their options were limited. Even Romita, who’d once told wife Virginia to tell Lee to go to hell (65), didn’t return to Marvel until he was “let go” by DC (according to his 2010 deposition). The book words it that he was “left without steady work” (155).
Creation of the FF
Back in the real world, falsehoods were introduced into the Marvel narrative at the beginning of the Cadence era… the Justice League, Joan Lee, the “synopsis.” The book reports on all of them.
72: “Joan Lee would be instrumental in the legend… several years later”
By page 88, the tale has graduated from legend to fact.
The 1960’s Marvel hero era was championed by Jack Kirby pushing Martin Goodman to try heroes again since the moment he arrived in 1958. That it took 4 years is due to the resistance he was up against. The silly story about Stan’s wife being the impetus is creative history hogwash. Michael J Vassallo, Marvel Method group, 27 December 2019.
Michael Vassallo: Does Stan, on his wife’s advice, finally do comic book stories like he wants to? (Having done a thousand Millie the Model, My Friend Irma, My Girl Pearl, Rusty, Lana, Tessie, Mitzi, Little Lenny, Little Lizzie, Nellie, Kathy, Ginch, Imp, Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs, Willie Lumpkin, et al stories, a smattering of recent westerns, and not a single superhero since 1942).
Does Stan (and Goodman), after constant pushing by Kirby, relent and see what he proposes? (Having already done the most visually exciting superheroes hits of the golden-age, co-invented the romance comics genre, produced some of the most respected genre comics of the genre age, Sky Masters, Challengers of the Unknown for DC, The Fly at Archie, bug powers via an “extract” for Harvey, two different previous Thors, untold powerful monsters, and a score of “ancient gods walking among men” stories). Stan Lee (1922-2018) – The Timely Years, Timely-Atlas-Comics blog post.
Steve Sherman: The thing is, if Joe Maneely hadn’t died, things would have been a lot different. I guess you can call it fate, destiny, random events, but Jack probably would have found something else. Yes it was early ’61 that Goodman was going to pull the plug. Don’t forget, the Marvel offices at the time were pretty small, so it wasn’t a big deal to close the office. I would guess that Goodman had not yet informed the printer or engravers, since that would have been bought ahead of time. I would guess that last issues of the books had been sent out. Jack couldn’t let them close. Jack had always been working on ideas for books. He was pretty well aware of what was being published. He always felt that “superhero” books would make a comeback. Since Goodman already had the pipeline going, it wasn’t too much to give it another shot, especially since it was Jack. He had come through before, so why not. As Jack told me, he came up with all of the titles at once. He called it a “blitzkrieg”. He felt if he put out a bunch of new books at once, it would make a splash. He had “FF”, “Spider-Man”, “The X-Men” and “Thor” and “Hulk”. You can believe it or not, but that’s what he told me. By email to Patrick Ford, 2018.
Kirby related the same experience to Gary Groth in 1989.
87: “Lee was about to resign…”
Let’s get real. Goodman was about to, and did, pull the plug. (No new Marvel product hit the stands during the month of October 1961. An even longer shutdown saw no comic books published from 27 October until 29 December the previous year.) Furniture was being moved, tears were spilled. Kirby presented his concepts to Goodman, Goodman approved one off the pile. At that point, as Larry Lieber himself once characterized it, Lee entered the picture. “When Stan saw that the strips had potential, he started writing them…” Lieber in conversation with Thomas, Alter Ego #2 (1999).
94: “Assuming that Lee’s plot outline… was the template Kirby used… the synopsis”
Roy Thomas has thrown his reputation behind the so-called document, but Kirby called it “an outright lie.” This is one of the cases where Kirby’s statement on a subject has been omitted.
Like Fantastic Four, Challengers of the Unknown depicted the adventures of four people who form a team after surviving an air crash. The members of the Challengers had personality traits similar to the Fantastic Four. Pilot “Ace” Morgan, like the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, was the decisive leader of his group. “Rocky” Ryan, like Benjamin Grimm, aka “The Thing,” was the group’s strongman. Daredevil “Red” Ryan was the resident firebrand, much like Johnny Storm. “Prof” Haley was, like Sue Storm, the bland and nondescript member of the group. The Challengers team, like the Fantastic Four, confronted science fiction enemies in a wide variety of fantastic settings.
Furthermore, in light of how important the new Fantastic Four comic was to the firm’s line, it seems implausible to me that Lee would suddenly change this working relationship and not first consult with Kirby on this new book, especially given Kirby’s decades of experience in the superhero genre (e.g. Captain America) and renowned ability to spontaneously and quickly generate so many publishable creations.
After Fantastic Four had been published and was a success, Lee produced a synopsis for the first story which he said was what he gave Kirby to work from. Kirby, however, consistently asserted that he never saw any kind of typed synopsis or treatment for the Fantastic Four. Expert Report of Mark Evanier, expert witness on behalf of the defendants, Marvel Worldwide, Inc. et al v. Kirby et al, submitted 4 November 2010.
90: Challengers is mentioned as an afterthought, as something with which people noticed similarities. Let’s put it in its historical context, a few pages earlier as part of the “slow but steady superhero revival.” Kirby’s Challengers was given its own title, escaping its Showcase tryout in fewer months than The Flash did. Kirby’s Challengers predated the JLA in the superhero revival by three years, and even without Kirby, was outselling JLA’s Brave and the Bold in 1960, when the JLA would have been around for Goodman to notice. The first JLA cover “paid homage” to Kirby’s Showcase #12 Challengers cover before the similarity was noticed between Kirby’s FF #1 cover and the first JLA cover.
Fingeroth states as fact the speculation that Challengers was co-created by Joe Simon: the Lee saga comes with the need to always portray Kirby as someone who didn’t write and didn’t create. Evanier wrote, “The first SHOWCASE issue of CHALLENGERS was produced out of the Simon-Kirby studio, before it had a publisher, and as with many Joe/Jack projects, it’s a little hard to tell where Simon leaves off and Kirby begins, at least with regard to the writing. Joe says he wrote it. Jack said he wrote it. My guess is they both wrote it. If you buy that, then it’s a question of whether you think co-writing the issue is enough to entitle Simon to co-creator credit. I would think so but it’s not as clear-cut as some other projects.” (Kirby-L, 19 Nov 1996.)
Rich Morrissey responded to Evanier at length. “As for the Challengers of the Unknown, Jack Schiff’s records show that Dave Wood came up with the idea and was paid for scripting the story. I can well believe, and writing style expert Martin O’Hearn has backed this up, that Jack Kirby completely rescripted the story when he drew it, and apparently DC has as well—to the point where they give Kirby sole credit for creating the Challengers, exclusive of Wood…
“But what, in that case, was Joe Simon’s involvement? I’ve never known it to be mentioned by any of the people involved with the title during Kirby’s lifetime, and Ben Oda’s lettering is only a natural result of his work with Kirby, just as Simon and Kirby’s letterer at Marvel on Captain America (Ferguson) came to DC with them when they changed employers in 1942.
“Martin’s comments on the script are telling: “‘What’s his name?’ ‘I’ll bet it’s a corker!’ And: ‘Exactly, sir! Witchcraft! Black magic! Sorcery! Some practiced it. Many feared it. But nobody ever laughed at it!’ Or: ‘Shades of Uncle Zeke’s chicken roost!’ You tell me: did those lines from SHOWCASE #6, the first Challengers story, come from the writer of The Demon or the writer of The Green Team? I guess Mark Evanier, figuring that it originated in the Simon/Kirby office, is working from a false conclusion: that Simon rather than Kirby was the writer there.” (Kirby-L, 24 Dec 1996.)
Goodman was probably aware of the success of Challengers, and had seen DC themselves imitate Challengers with Suicide Squad, Sea Devils, and the JLA. He was nudged into action by Kirby’s presentation, after he’d actually pulled the plug on the comics division; his renowned knowledge of the market may have determined which of Kirby’s concepts to audition first. The idea that Goodman would say, “I’ve taken measures to kill the comics division, let’s have a team of superheroes” is on par with Lee sneaking a hated spider character into a cancelled title, or Lee betting Goodman he could make a success of a war comic with a ridiculous name.
TNJ: After 10 issues of Captain America you left, didn’t you?
KIRBY: Yes, Joe and I went to work with DC. We did the Sandman and The Boy Commandos. We had one thing called the Newsboy Legion which was a pretty nice little strip. Before I left I created the Young Allies for Atlas which was a patriotic strip and actually was the first team strip – in other words four boys. Following that there was four anything. Four boys, four girls, four super villains or super heroes. It became kind of a team thing and it might have been a kind of primitive predecessor to The Fantastic Four. Even before I created the FF I created the Challengers, which…
TNJ: …is the same thing.
KIRBY: And if you notice the uniforms, they’re the same. Kirby interviewed in 1969 by Mark Hebert, conducted early 1969, appeared in The Nostalgia Journal #30, November 1976, and #31, December 1976.
91: An attempt is made to put the discussion to rest using Mark Evanier’s words from King of Comics: “Among those who worked around them at the time, there was a unanimous view: Fantastic Four was created by Stan and Jack. No further division of credit seemed appropriate.”
By Chapter 21, Evanier is dismayed that Lee didn’t follow this in his deposition, instead doubling down and backtracking on any sharing of credit that may have slipped through in Origins. Evanier “felt that Lee had a responsibility to at least reiterate what he’d said in the past regarding Kirby having been instrumental in creating characters.” Mark’s alternate reality has room for a benevolent Lee but not Disney lawyers.
Consistency
75: “In later years, Kirby would claim…”
89: Kirby’s version… “inconsistent across various tellings”
222: “…Kirby, who, like Lee, would change his reported recollections and feelings about events over the years…”
Kirby would also make these claims in earlier years. Fingeroth has taken someone else’s word that Kirby’s account was inconsistent. Except for guarding his words when Marvel was the source of his paycheque (late ’60s, 1975-8) Kirby was remarkably consistent because he didn’t need to remember an alternate story that had been concocted for him. See these Kirby Museum links, Interviews and Chronology.
Lee began demonizing Kirby in the 1980s, questioning how he could say the things he’d said in interviews, whether he’d lost his mind. “I think Jack is really—I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to say anything against him. I think he is beginning to imagine things.” Stan Lee interviewed by Jim Salicrup and David Anthony Kraft in Comics Interview #5, July 1983.
“I think he’s gone beyond of no return,” Lee said. “Some of the things he said, there is no way he could ever explain that to me. I would have to think he’s either lost his mind or he’s a very evil person.” Steve Duin, “The Back Story on Stan Lee vs. Jack Kirby,” The Oregonian/OregonLive, 26 June 2011.
In 1998, in discussion with Thomas, Lee laughed off some of Kirby’s claims. This particular book about Stan Lee is governed by Lee’s stated disdain for Kirby’s truthfulness, avoiding some direct quotes from Kirby’s version, and stating multiple times without examples that it was inconsistent.
Credit
215: Lee “loudly blew the horn for everyone in his circle… Month after month of Lee telling Marvel’s readers how great Jack was… While Stan Lee had not given Jack Kirby his talent, and while Kirby had a wide and deep professional track record going back to the 1930s, the fact was that his current high-profile, living-legend status was the product of tireless and ceaseless promotion by the man who had been Stanley Martin Lieber.”
This is exactly backwards. It was Stan Lee the persona that would have ceased to exist in 1961 had Kirby not been given a crack at realizing his creations. Kirby would have continued in the industry, telling solid stories wherever he could find work, maybe not with a company of such a low calibre as Goodman’s comics operation. While parsing Lee’s horn-blowing and status giving, it’s important to note how often Lee referred to Kirby as anything other than an artist, or when Lee’s praise of Kirby’s creativity and plotting ability could be monetized by Kirby. The answer is… never. Jack Kirby was never given a plotting credit at Marvel from the time credits were instituted in 1962 until his departure in 1970. Lee credited himself as plotter on the first story with such a credit, one that was so obviously a Kirby plot. There were assorted other plot credits during that time, including Tommy and Jimmy Goodkind, apparently Lee’s neighbour’s kids, in Strange Tales #116. This despite the fact that Kirby was the primary plotter during those years, for his own stories as well as the stories he laid out for others.
Ditko’s Avenging Mind is given a fair amount of coverage in the book, but is dismissed for the wrong reason (discussed later). Ditko’s assessment of Lee’s crediting is explored in “Creative Crediting”: “All of these combinations of Stan’s credits of ‘Scripted by’, ‘Script and editing by’ and ‘Written by’, etc. are all claiming, implying, a full script by Lee. In using such terms and phrases as ‘Illustrated by’, ‘Art by’, ‘Artwork by’ and ‘Illustrations’ (in crediting me), all of which are factually, truthfully, incorrect identifications, Lee is claiming my artwork was done from his full script… Yet Lee never wrote a full script for me.”
This is followed by “He Giveth and He Taketh Away”: “Stan Lee started early with his self-serving, self-crediting writing and speaking style…”
244: Origins. “Lee was, to be sure, effusive in his compliments for Kirby and Ditko, but the narrative made it clear that it was Stan Lee who was the major creative force behind Marvel and its characters… not surprising given that his two most important collaborators had abandoned him and the company.”
Abandoned? Lee’s two most important collaborators had walked away from the man who, in this era of not calling a lie a lie, was appropriating their writing pay. He was effusive in his compliments for his artists, and Kirby and Ditko refused to be constrained by his demeaning terminology; his followers were and are taken in, but his unpaid writers saw through it.
323: Lee’s deposition… “While giving Kirby great praise… Lee” in his deposition!
Q. And this is — you talked about it before that artists were expected as part of their job to populate the story with characters?
STAN LEE: Oh. You see, if there’s a story where the hero goes, let’s say, to a nightclub, so I would say or whoever the writer is would say the hero goes to a nightclub, and he talks to this person, and then there’s a gun fight. Well, when the artist draws it, the artist has to draw other people in the nightclub. So the artist is always creating new characters. I mean, the artist might decide to have the character standing at the bar and draw a sexy-looking bartender, a female or an interesting looking bartender. Videotaped Deposition of Stan Lee, 13 May 2010 (the first of two)
Lee credited his “artists” with “creating” a sexy-looking bartender character. As was his way, he “effusively” and with “great praise,” credited Kirby with nothing.
4 (Preface): And to a small group of comics fans and professionals, he was the most dastardly of villains, exploiting victimized artists who did all the real creative work, while he was just a lucky, slimy manipulator who was in the right place at the right time.
Was Lee in the right place at the right time? Absolutely. He was the promoter who made a connection with his readers. As the Sherman/Groth account indicates, Kirby was the predominant creator and plotter (and Ditko did the rest). Kirby, Ditko, and Wood were the early 1960s writers, with Lee adding the teen humour-style dialogue and restructuring stories to make them less literate (Kirby being the reader on the team). Despite the fact that so many of Lee’s pre-1961 characters had been female (Patsy, Linda, Millie, Kathy, et al), he used his power of dialogue to remove or re-interpret any agency or acts of heroism from women in Kirby’s stories.
Fingeroth reduces detractors of The Official Stan Lee Story (called “haters” on the back cover) to objects of amusement, unsurprising given the target audience. My objection is to the term “victimized artists.” Artist was the term used by Lee to remove credit from his writers and creator/writers. It’s time to put that lie to rest.
Further observations
28: “according to Simon, Kirby always believed” Lee ratted them out.
Simon’s account of Kirby’s beliefs is not to be trusted. Simon always gave himself the starring creative role in his historical fiction.
29: “Lee was writing many of these stories as well as numerous superhero tales, in addition to editing the titles. At that point, energetic young man didn’t seem to have much if any editorial assistance.”
Nonsense. Not only was Lee not the only editor at the time, but Goodman was listed as the editor.
45: “Lee had amassed an enormous quantity of inventoried stories… Supposedly, when Goodman one day discovered all these pages in a closet… he was so infuriated he decided to fire everybody and burn off the excess.” Patrick Ford, Marvel Method, 1 January 2020: The book does cast doubt of the “art in the closet” reason for firing the staff. However it fails to mention that Martin Goodman never said that was the reason. Stan Lee claims Martin Goodman said that. The fact is that Goodman would logically have been thrilled that the staff was producing so well that he had a large inventory built up. He should only have been annoyed if the staff was not producing enough rather than more than enough.
The more logical reason for getting rid of the staff was given by Al Jaffee who said it had to do with taxes and medical insurance.
The way Lee tells the story makes Lee appear to be the victim of his own largess. Good ol’ Stan buying even stuff that wasn’t good enough to print. Where in reality he wasn’t buying anything. The staff was punching a time clock. They were paid by the hour not by the page.
59: “While writing some superhero stories that year…”
Purposefully misleading: this follows a description of the failed superhero revival… Lee wrote none of them, and no other superhero stories that year.
64: Lieber… “was drawing—and possibly writing—romance comics”
It stands to reason that if Lieber was to be credited as the writer on Kirby’s stories, there’s no limit to the writing that can be attributed to him, even before he started writing.
76: “Though Larry started out writing romance scripts, eventually Lee would delegate the scripting of many of the Kirby-drawn monster stories to his brother to write.”
Many? In the absence of signatures, the word of the Lieber brothers is the only thing this claim has going for it. Not only did they not make the claim before 1995, neither of them even mentioned Lieber in that context, given a number of opportunities.
78: “So Lee kept working on other projects.” Patrick Ford, Marvel Method, 27 December 2019: What is interesting to me is just about everything Lee tried was either a comic strip or something closely related to comics or panel cartoons. And yet a staple of Lee biographies is Lee contending for decades that he was ashamed of comics and yearned to escape the field.
If , as he says, Lee really aspired to write the great American novel why didn’t he make attempts to sell fiction to Goodman’s magazines or to other publishers ?
The bottom line is Jack Kirby, who also proposed loads of comic strips, wrote more fiction (at least three teleplays and a novel) than Stan Lee is known to have written.
Mark Mayerson, Marvel Method, 27 December 2019: The other thing about Lee’s outside projects is that they were all humorous. He wasn’t writing adventure or drama. He obviously felt that his strongest potential for outside sales was comedy. Yet, he’s celebrated for “creating” heroes and adventures when it was obviously not his strength.
Kirby, on the other hand, had done very little humor in his career. His work was all about heroes and adventure. Yet, somehow, Lee is the “creator” of the Marvel universe and Kirby was only the artist who drew up Lee’s ideas.
The truth is so obvious for anyone who bothers to look.
82: “Many of the stories were created in what would come to be called the “Marvel Method” of short plot discussion, followed by pencil art, followed by dialogue, and then inks and colors. That method would come to be the source of much controversy in Lee’s life.”
According to Mark Evanier’s description, it’s the way Kirby worked solo. To work with Lee, he wrote margin notes instead of balloons and captions.
83: “the Lee-Kirby team would try their hand at a new superhero—inked by Ditko—the magic-themed Dr. Droom.”
The story has no Lee signature. Judging by the finished work, Kirby and Ditko are the only ones we can be certain actually worked on it.
112: Spider-Man–”The closest to truth we have… either before or after Lee had decided to come up with an insect-derived, teenage superhero…”
Ditko ultimately wrote that he didn’t know who originated the ideas in Kirby’s 5-page story. Kirby and Ditko were in agreement, but Lee’s version denies that Ditko told him that Kirby’s story was similar to The Fly (also a Kirby story).
114: “Are we to infer from this that Ditko felt, that, while he and Stan might have cocreated the character, that Steve deserved the lion’s share of the credit?”
We are to infer nothing more than that Ditko wanted cocreator credit, and that Lee wasn’t going to give it to him without taking it away in the next breath.
116: “Interestingly, and mostly unnoticed by the general public, in his introduction to 2013’s The Art of Ditko…”
Lee credited Ditko as cocreator when no one was paying attention, why? It was a meaningless gesture, and given all the attention it deserved by Ditko.
116: The Avenging Mind: “Ditko seemed to simply believe that Lee was not credible, apparently because he did not share Ditko’s philosophical principles.”
This is utter nonsense: Ditko didn’t hold anyone up to his own principles. Lee was not credible because he had a history of making stuff up to steal credit from his creator/writers. Ditko had his number.
116, 117: “Ditko gave little, if any, weight to Stan’s contributions as scripter, editor, art director, and, yes, co-plotter for many of the Spider-Man stories they did together, before Lee agreed to give Ditko full plotting credit.” and “the early issues were most likely true collaborations…”
Stan Taylor proves convincingly that plots for the early issues came from combining plot elements from recent Kirby stories, so it’s safe to assume that they were contained in Kirby’s concept pages. Ditko’s description of a story conference with Lee mentions the need to repeatedly steer Lee away from hare-brained ideas. If Kirby plotted the early issues, and Ditko was sole plotter from about #14 onward, which are the issues for which Lee should get plot credit?
118: “It’s here that Lee’s life story really assumes a key part in the Spider-Man mythos“
Jameson grew out of Lee’s experience of menial jobs? Jameson is Ditko’s jab at Lee, in the same way that Lee was the inspiration for Kirby creations Ego, Maximus, Infant Terrible, …
125: “Thor… was birthed by Lee (plot), Lieber (script), and Kirby (pencils and probably plot input)”
The first Thor story was clearly a Kirby plot, containing recurring Kirby science fiction characters.
125: Ant Man—”Jewish creators Lee, Lieber, and Kirby?”
The origin story bears no Lee signature, so we can only be certain Kirby and Ayers were there at the time. Another explanation from the House of Lies holds that, for some reason, Lee didn’t sign all of his stories, but we know better.
126: Tales of Suspense #39. “The [Iron Man] origin story was by Lee, Lieber, and Don Heck.”
Kirby plot (recycled from his Green Arrow story), concept sketch-turned-cover, and possibly layouts. Kirby’s own origin story appears in the following issue, which suggests it was delayed for some reason.
126: “The words twas Steve’s idea leave unclear if Lee was referring to the character, the character’s origin, the series’ mystical motif, the plot to the first story, or some combination of those elements.”
Let’s see how we can re-interpret ’twas Steve’s idea. Ditko brought the character, and story, to Lee on spec.
127: Stupid origin stories you know aren’t true… “According to Lee, to prove that the Marvel ‘formula’ could work in any genre, he and Kirby came up with the World War II-set battle comic Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos, whose eponymous first issue was dated May 1963.”
Oops. John Severin (Kirby Collector #25) told of Kirby pitching the concept to him as a newspaper strip, pre-Marvel, near Columbus Circle. Creative input by Lee? Zero. Can we apply the credibility of Lee’s claim here to his other claims?
127: X-Men
Created by Kirby, who at least knew what a mutant was (see Yellow Claw), and what a transistor wasn’t.
128: “…with the exception of Dr Strange and Spider-Man, all the characters emerged from some combination of the talents of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with Larry Lieber contributing, although Larry has never claimed to have conceived or designed any of the characters.”
I see where this is going. Lieber never claimed to have written any of Kirby’s sf/fantasy stories before the ‘90s. He’s being held in reserve in case more evidence emerges that Kirby did any of the creating (such as when a page of original art surfaces with Kirby’s penciled dialogue in the balloons).
161: Herald Tribune article… “Lee felt terrible about it.”
Did Lee have it in him to feel terrible about it?
161: Herald Tribune article… “at least partly staged…”
A little knowledge of Nat Freedland might indicate that it was more than partly staged. Note that in January 1966, Lee was concealing from Freedland the fact, by criticizing him in the present tense, that Ditko had been gone for a month and a half.
166: Simon’s version of the 1966 lawsuit…
Taken from My Life in Comics, a work of historical fiction on par with Origins of Marvel Comics or Mair’s Excelsior! Simon should not be permitted to speak for Kirby’s motivation, because he was not present in any discussion between Kirby and Goodman, and it was Simon who was cutting Kirby out of the suit.
167: typo… “Lee and Kirby” should be “Simon and Kirby”
199: “it does seem that not getting to do the Surfer series was perceived as a significant slight by Kirby…”
It may be baffling, but it does seem that way,
Kirby interviewed on the Tim Skelly Show, WNUR radio, 14 May 1971. What do you think the advantages are over at National?
The advantages? Well, I have a lot more leeway. I can think things out and do them my way, and know I get credit for the things I do. There were times at Marvel when I couldn’t say anything because it would be taken from me and put in another context, and it would be lost—all my connection with it would be severed. For instance, I created the Silver Surfer and Galactus and an army of other characters and my connection with them is lost. Therefore I just kept all the new ideas to myself. This sounds like a problem…
You get to feel like a ghost.
204: PF&C purchase. “According to Lee, Goodman made him verbal promises…”
Earlier in the decade, also according to Lee, Goodman made promises to Kirby and Ditko that needed to be relayed by Lee, because Kirby and Ditko didn’t usually talk to Goodman. Did Goodman ever actually make verbal promises?
226: “Along with the intensity of his visuals and concepts, Kirby also provided idiosyncratic scripting in a style seemingly designed to be the opposite of Lee’s reader-friendly, narrative-clarifying, naturalistic word usage.”
A good book would compare examples of Kirby’s “idiosyncratic scripting” with examples of “Lee’s reader-friendly, narrative-clarifying, naturalistic word usage,” instead of just pretending this statement is true.
233: “A self-involved hustler and promoter, Flashman—once his toupee and fake beard were in place—looked exactly like Stan Lee of the era. Funky was a pathetic character, self-involved, leeching off a relative, willing to sell anyone out in service to himself and to the primary villain of Kirby’s Fourth World, Darkseid.”
Was this portrayal way off the mark, or incisive? Is it maybe the most accurate picture we’re ever likely to get of Lee from someone who knew him better than most other people in that context?
253: “If all he’d wanted was to pump out work for hire comics, he could have stayed at Marvel, where Stan Lee was, near the end of Kirby’s time there, pretty much giving him autonomy—and credit—anyway.”
This must be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. See abusive situation above.
260: “There were rumors that staffers were deliberately printing a higher proportion of negative letters about Kirby’s titles than were actually received and were making fun of his output with nasty annotated pages of his comics pinned up on the office walls.”
Rumours? Stephen Bissette, John Morrow, and Mark Evanier are spreading those rumours as first-hand experience.
261: “Kirby had no intention of plotting stories for someone else to dialogue.”
Fingeroth understands something that seems to perpetually mystify Thomas.
290: TCJ interview: “Even staunch supporters of Kirby thought the interview was over the top, Kirby reviling Lee to a degree that he had never before publicly done.”
I suspect Fingeroth has been speaking to the wrong staunch Kirby supporters.
Neal Kirby: Though my opinion may be viewed by some as non-objective, I can say that my father spoke the truth in this (Gary Groth) interview. Stan Lee has the advantage since my father’s death in 1993 of being the last man standing.
He has been able to say, claim, invent whatever he wants without fear of rebuttal! Is it conceivable that Stan Lee, with little knowledge of mythology, much less Norse mythology could come up with the premise of Thor as a super hero? Isn’t it much more likely that my father, whose studio on Long Island was filled with books on history and mythology, of which his favorite was Norse mythology, would be much more likely to have created such a character? I could go on as such concerning almost all the Marvel characters. What bothers me the most, however, is that Stan Lee is rewriting history in his favor, and young people now are starting to view him as the lone creator of the Marvel characters. There have been many injustices in the 80+ years of comic book history; this without question is one of the greatest. Comments section, “TCJ Archive: Jack Kirby Interview,” The Comics Journal website, 2 June 2011.
295-7: Ditko and Lee… “When they saw each other, both their faces lit up…”
DeFalco: Then Steve walked away, and I had one of those surreal moments where, as I’m walking down the hall with Stan, Stan says to me, “You know, Tommy, I’ve always been curious about this. Do you know why Steve quit?” Mark Mayerson, Marvel Method, 30 December 2019: As editor and later publisher, Lee could have called Ditko at any time and asked Ditko directly. The fact that he didn’t means that either he knew or didn’t care enough to bother. His asking others why Ditko quit is nothing more than a cover-up, making Lee seem to be the injured party and not the cause.
309, 310: “Something had changed for Ditko. No longer was he the person who seven years earlier had exchanged hugs with Stan Lee. ”
Well, he was the same person, but like Kirby at the convention, his upbringing told him how to behave when meeting the boss who had refused to speak to him for over a year in a previous decade.
305: bankruptcy
Lee was fired by Marvel on 30 July 1998. He was signed to a new contract in November.
308: “Lee’s friend, Batman cocreator Bob Kane”
Another credit thief, but at least Kane paid his uncredited creator/writers.
311, 324: Arthur Lieberman
Not much is mentioned about Lieberman, but it would be interesting to explore his involvement in Origins of Marvel Comics and the recruiting of Roy Thomas 24 years later.
311, 317: syndicated Spider-Man strip?
At the time of Lee’s death, Thomas said he’d been writing it for “17, 18 years.” Coupled with Jim Shooter’s claim that it was him who was writing it earlier, it’s not hard to conclude that Lee got paid for it ($125k per year according to one superseded contract) without actually writing it.
312: Uslan doesn’t have the remotest concept of how Kirby and Lee “collaborated.”
322: “the estate of Jack Kirby, through lawyer Marc Toberoff, filed suit against Disney”
Legal specifics are important, and presumably Disney’s legal proofreaders should have caught this egregious misstatement of fact. The Kirbys, through lawyer Marc Toberoff, filed for reassignment of the copyrights; they did not file suit against Disney. Disney filed suit against the Kirbys.
322: Lee’s testimony: “more or less, the history of the characters’ creation as recounted by him in his 1974 book, Origins of Marvel Comics.”
Much, much less, or the book wouldn’t be quoting Fingeroth’s interview with Mark Evanier.
352: “There was one key insight, though, that Stan Lee had that Kirby and Ditko did not. Lee came to see that, in the early 1960s, there was an audience of adult fans who had read comics as children and were still interested in them… maybe there was some way to reclaim those older readers, now in college or in the work world, to get them to help spread the idea that comics were cool or even relevant…” Chris Tolworthy, Marvel Method, 31 December 2019: Lee’s insight was that he could turn adults into children: Tell them they are clever and brave and cool if they join the treehouse club. Kirby and Ditko were busy turning children into adults: teaching them values that would help them recognise funky flashmen and the harm they cause.
353: Lee: “I always wrote for myself.”
One only needs to look at a Kirby story restructured by Lee to know that Lee’s understanding of storytelling was dwarfed by Kirby’s; consequently Lee writing for himself meant dumbing down.
353: “Lee had the authority of an owner but the insecurity of a freelancer. He was still at the boss’s mercy—even though most of his colleagues saw him as the boss.”
Lee was always the boss to his “colleagues,” even if he needed to invoke Goodman’s name without Goodman’s knowledge.
For nearly sixty years until his death, Stan Lee represented himself as the driving creative force behind Marvel Comics, as well as its primary plotter and writer. For the last quarter of a century of his own life, Jack Kirby pushed back against Lee’s misappropriation of the credit due Kirby. With Stuf’ Said, John Morrow has done a great service by putting the two men’s claims in front of his target audience.
My issues with Stuf’ Said (and I must admit, I’m not a member of that target audience) stem from Morrow’s editorial interpretation of the material, coupled with a disproportionate representation of Lee’s point of view. I’m going to use these issues as a framework to introduce some of the material that was left out.
Morrow set the stage for Stuf’ Said in his editorial in The Jack Kirby Collector 73:
Are you a “Type A” kind of fan, who thinks Kirby deserves all the credit, Stan cheated Jack out of it, and this magazine doesn’t beat that drum loudly enough?
Or are you a “Type B” fan, who thinks Stan gets unfairly maligned by all the “Type A” fans, and this publication is unfairly skewed toward Jack?
Let me toss this out. How about we all be “Type C” fans—the kind that can put on our Big Boy (and Girl) Pants, consider others’ viewpoints, and admit that the reality might just lie somewhere between the two extremes?
Stan Lee will have turned 95 by the time you read this (on December 28, 2017), and TwoMorrows celebrated with a special 150th issue of Roy Thomas’ mag Alter Ego devoted to Stan. He toiled in the thankless business of comics for a lot of years, and God-willing, he’ll be with us many more. We gain nothing by denigrating The Man, and we don’t have to tear him down to build Jack up. Marvel Comics, through Disney, finally gets that. So should we. The battle’s over, folks, and we all won—both Kirby and Lee fans (not that those two groups are mutually exclusive)!
Just a few notes: no serious observer says Kirby deserves all the credit, or that Lee did nothing. These are imaginary arguments designed to be easily refuted. Lee had a massive impact on the work, through dialogue and forced redraws. There’s no compelling evidence, however, outside of his own account, that his contribution came before Kirby pencilled a given story.
Secondly, Lee did not toil unthanked in the thankless business of comics for a lot of years. The thanks and rewards he reaped far exceeded those afforded anyone else in comics (and many other fields), ever, in an industry infamous for its poor treatment of its contributors. His rewards were nominally for his own work, but were mostly for the work of others.
Thirdly, when the “battle” was over, no one told Lee or Roy Thomas: they both doubled down on their claims of the mythical Marvel creation saga. Never one to see straight where Kirby is concerned, Thomas is the custodian and often the author of the Lee version of events. He’s not required to participate in the Big Boy Pants exercise and look at things from the freelancers’ point of view, and indeed admits that the secret to being a Marvel historian is knowing that no one but Lee ever needed to be consulted. In Stuf’ Said, Morrow gives carte blanche to an individual intent on removing Kirby’s contribution from Marvel history.
We don’t have to tear down Lee to build up Kirby; we do need to tear down Lee’s false legacy. The discussion is decades old, and always begins with Stan Lee’s comments being taken as the truth; his Marvel narrative is treated as “common knowledge.” The alternate stories of Kirby or other Lee collaborators then appear to be challenging “the truth”: proof is demanded when it’s politely suggested that their accounts differed from Lee’s. Kirby’s own story is contested mercilessly, and requires a different degree of proof because Lee often preempted it with claims to the contrary. Lee put himself in the fan news from the beginning, and had a quarter of a century unanswered after Kirby’s death to press his advantage.
Stephen Bissette: Why, oh why, continue to favor Stan Lee’s account, with so much self-evident conflict-of-interest as a benchmark of his entire comics and media career; so many conflicting self-accounts from Stan himself; and such a clear, public record of Stan’s profiting and profiteering for much of his life from sustaining and spinning his own self-aggrandizing accounts? 1
Morrow from the last chapter, “The Verdict”:
One thing that tripped me up previously was Jack’s 1989 Comics Journal #134 interview, since back in the day, Kirby came across to me as a little nutty-sounding with some of the bitter recollections he brought to light. The most egregious is when he said, “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.”
A few pages earlier, Morrow had provided a “but” to this statement, but it was wiped away in the conclusion. We’ll parse Kirby’s claim later, and I’ll be exploring the applicability of Morrow’s word egregious. For now I’ll just say that being “tripped up” by a 1989 Kirby interview suggests that Morrow hadn’t been paying attention to the previous 20 years of Kirby’s interviews, which all told the same story. TJKC is undoubtedly the best source of those interviews, obscure and otherwise, but they’re tossed out the window with this one concluding statement.
CONCLUSION
Because I began this as an email to John Morrow addressing the issues point-by-point as I read through the book, the volume of supplemental information below is daunting. With that I’ll come to the point and give my verdict. Please grab a copy of the book (available from Amazon or in PDF from twomorrows.com) and follow along to see the references in context.
Stuf’ Said puts an unprecedented amount of little-known Kirby material in front of a wider audience than it’s had before, an admirable achievement. The benefit, however, is outweighed by an uncritical treatment of the Stan Lee mythology, putting it on par with Kirby’s version, and further entrenching it by giving it the TwoMorrows stamp of approval. Morrow also rehashes a number of discredited myths about Kirby: the art directorship myth, the Kirby needed reining-in myth, the Kirby should have stood up for himself myth. In the name of appearing impartial, Kirby’s account is treated overly critically.
Despite a verifiable record of untruths dating back to the advent of his new career as “creator,” Lee is accepted as a reliable witness to the events of history. Morrow has taken a position that’s similar to the mainstream media stance: the Lee version, the accepted wisdom, is part of what goes uncontested in Stuf’ Said. The sheer volume of Lee material, first-hand and from the supplemental witnesses, overwhelms Kirby’s.
The witness list is hierarchical: Roy Thomas is at the top of this hierarchy, as is Joe Simon. With a few notable exceptions, their words are passed along uncontested, despite that in both cases they’re advancing agendas that can’t allow Kirby to be taken seriously. Lee comes next: Morrow directly challenges a number of Lee’s statements and even dismisses some outright, but many of Lee’s abundant myths (and stories from others that could only have originated with Lee) are simply read into the record.
With the exception of Steve Ditko and Wallace Wood, both of whom quit Lee over the same grievances voiced by Kirby, most of the other witnesses quoted in the book tell a variation of Lee’s false history; they’re not testifying to what happened, they’re testifying to what they were told by Lee. This is a difficult situation arising from the fact that for the most part there were two eyewitnesses (and Thomas wasn’t one of them).
At the bottom of the hierarchy is Kirby, and Stuf’ Said actually bolsters the case against him. Thomas and the rest of Lee’s attestors, plus Simon, grace the pages of this issue of The Jack Kirby Collector for the express purpose of discrediting Kirby’s words so we can wear our Big Boy Pants and agree the truth was somewhere in the middle. Kirby’s quotes (like the one where he called the idea of working from Lee’s FF #1 plot “an outright lie”), go unremarked, do not factor into “The Verdict,” or are absent altogether.
Big Boy Pants aside, intellectual honesty requires a decision at this point. The accounts of the two men provide no option for both to be telling the truth, even truth according to their own definition of the word “writing.” Lee did not simply seek to be credited as the writer: he declared, “the characters’ concepts were mine.” 2 As Steve Ditko wrote, “someone is lying.” 3
The correct approach in Stuf’ Said would be to let Kirby and Lee speak for themselves without any analysis. Alternatively, after assembling this impressive collection of information, Morrow simply should have endeavored to indiscriminately QUESTION EVERYTHING.
Quotes that follow from Stuf’ Said are specified by page number, with the name of the speaker in square brackets. A second page number in square brackets refers to Stuf’ Said: The Expanded Second Edition. Quotes from the book not explicitly identified are John Morrow’s.
The book is full of great examples of John Morrow’s insight into Kirby’s side of the story. It’s unfortunate that it all gets tossed when a conclusion is deemed necessary.
Stuf’ Said p 17: There’s something Stan fails to mention in his 1998 response, which would lend credence to Jack’s account: That around this time, Marvel is closing its doors, exactly as Kirby states.
Although there was another imminent shutdown coinciding with Kirby’s 1958 arrival, Steve Sherman says Kirby told him this was 1961 (see p 19, below).
Kate Willaert: “One thing that really surprised me was October 1961. Marvel shipped an entire month’s worth of books in the last week of September 1961 (including Fantastic Four #2), and then published nothing in October. Four whole weeks of nothing.”4
20-22: (presentation art)
…and…
[Kirby] “I came in with presentations. I’m not gonna wait around for conferences. I said, ‘This is what you have to do.’ I came in with Spiderman, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. I didn’t fool around. I said, ‘You’ve got to do super-heroes.’ I took Spiderman from the Silver Spider—a script by Jack Oleck that we hadn’t used in Mainline. That’s what gave me the idea for Spiderman. I’ve still got that script .”
Very well described. Steve Sherman also mentioned the fact that Goodman was shutting down in 1961, borne out by the lack of product in October (after FF #2 was published).
Steve Sherman: ‘The thing is, if Joe Maneely hadn’t died, things would have been a lot different. I guess you can call it fate, destiny, random events, but Jack probably would have found something else. Yes it was early ’61 that Goodman was going to pull the plug. Don’t forget, the Marvel offices at the time were pretty small, so it wasn’t a big deal to close the office. I would guess that Goodman had not yet informed the printer or engravers, since that would have been bought ahead of time. I would guess that last issues of the books had been sent out. Jack couldn’t let them close. Jack had always been working on ideas for books. He was pretty well aware of what was being published. He always felt that “superhero” books would make a comeback. Since Goodman already had the pipeline going, it wasn’t too much to give it another shot, especially since it was Jack. He had come through before, so why not. As Jack told me, he came up with all of the titles at once. He called it a “blitzkrieg”. He felt if he put out a bunch of new books at once, it would make a splash. He had “FF”, “Spider-Man”, “The X-Men” and “Thor” and “Hulk”. You can believe it or not, but that’s what he told me.’5
34[36]: Does the omission, after Stan making sure he is credited for all those previous issues’ plots, indicate that Kirby is the uncredited plotter of #114? For that matter, knowing that Lee was always diligent about including his own credit line, does the lack of a specific “Plotted by” credit in a comic mean the plot was either only partially by Stan, or had no involvement by him at all?
38[41]: Kirby may’ve already been drawing Avengers #6 when Stan writes this, which would indicate Jack is handling the lion’s share of plotting.
Kirby was drawing his story for Strange Worlds #1 in 1958 when he resumed the lion’s share of the plotting. Prior to that he was simply assumed to be the writer of his work.
42[46]: Stan apparently has Don Heck plot Avengers #11, and then redraw the ending after he sees the pencils—because if Stan plotted it, wouldn’t he know ahead of time that it isn’t the real Spider-Man?
Yes.
43[47]: The first couple have credits for “Stan Lee, writer” and “Jack Kirby, illustrator”, but these are identical plots to the 1940s stories, for which Stan had no involvement—yet by default, he’s getting credit for plotting, due to the omission of any mention of the source material.
Captain America is not the exception.
95[103]: Examine this last comment by Lee, and compare it to any other occupation’s real-life workplace. What Stan’s saying here is, instead of hiring (and paying) another employee when he is too busy to do the work himself, he shifts part of his workload to other existing employees (i.e., the artists), but doesn’t pay them additionally for it. So effectively, Martin Goodman is getting extra employees for free, rather than having to hire new ones. This is a great deal for management, but lousy for the workers—it’s no wonder many of the artists come to resent this division of labor.
Nearly correct. Now give Lee the page rate for the writing he’s not doing, which was the motivation for starting the whole process. Effectively, Goodman is paying the same money, but the writing rate is going to the wrong person.
99[109]: Salt shaker: I’d assume, instead of being talked into it, Kirby insisted on dialoguing “The Inhumans,” so any plans he had for them wouldn’t be usurped, like his ideas for the Silver Surfer, Him, and Galactus had been.
Good call.
109[119]: Funky Flashman.
Nice exercise, followed by some nice detective work in the second edition to determine what might have been the trigger. It goes without saying that the underlying reason is still treated in Stuf’ Said as the elephant in the room. With Mister Miracle #6, Kirby was the model of restraint after ten years subject to the Marvel Method.
116[128]: It makes for great promo copy, but historically, this is simply impossible. The idea that Stan is doing radio interviews about Marvel, prior to Journey into Mystery #83, seems rather far-fetched.
Good call. I think “impossible” outdoes “seems far-fetched.”
116[128]: Was the [Fourth World] series ended for financial reasons as they’ve said? [Kirby] “No. No financial reasons involved. I can’t make a statement unless I make it in concert with those who make policy.”
This would be a good place to mention the changing market conditions, and Robert Beerbohm’s assertion (in TwoMorrows’ own Comic Book Artist) that The New Gods and The Forever People were targets of affidavit return fraud. This type of speculation involved independent distributors selling comics out the “back door” in “large lots” while being reported as destroyed. Not being a target, Mister Miracle was missed by Carmine Infantino’s hatchet.6
120[132]: Lee continues to recount the early days of Marvel for the press, and hones his message…
Accurate description.
122[134]: This must be a bogus anecdote, since in 1960, Stan hadn’t been working on any super-heroes for some time. And the “Atlas Monsters” wouldn’t be what he is referring to, as they don’t have “superhuman powers.”
It’s good to point this out, but it’s not done nearly enough in Stuf’ Said.
138[151]: I’m objecting again here, as Lee isn’t fully addressing the issue. He’s completely avoiding any discussion of whether Marvel was about to close when Kirby arrived, and only focusing on the “crying” comment.
Lee’s response is rendered irrelevant by the fact that Kirby’s “blitz” in early 1961 was followed by a lapse in publication for the month of October.
144[158]: After re-reading it in chronological context with all I’ve documented up to this point, much of what Kirby says makes more sense to me now than it did when this was published in 1990, but some sections still seem exaggerated, and understandably bitter…
This is the “but” that vanishes in the last chapter: more needs to be said here. Morrow should have a better appreciation that more of the interview is simply the truth. Kirby is not a bitter or hateful man (see p 5 below, under Just Plain Wrong). The same standard of scrutiny should be applied to Lee’s words.
151[166]: And am I the only one who thinks this idea [Thor using his hammer for transport] is more likely to originate from Kirby than Lee?
No.
151[166]: So, is Lee a credit-hog, who takes any credit that isn’t nailed down, and will stop at nothing to keep others from getting any? He certainly was effusive in his praise for Kirby over the years: [Lee] “Jack was one of the best artists in the business; one of the best artists I ever worked with.” 152[166]: But giving Kirby a compliment, and giving him equal credit for creating, are two very different things—and this is something that Lee often can’t often bring himself to do, especially in this later era.
This says it all: effusive in his praise, calling Kirby “one of the best artists,” “Lee always gave Kirby credit.” Yet as Ditko wrote in 2008 7, Lee was removing credit for the writing being done by “his artists” (for which he was also removing the page rate). Just to be clear, Lee was removing the writing pay for the work that was already done by his writer/artists, and then publicly providing them with a label that categorized them as artists who executed his ideas. Morrow’s “often” is spectacularly understated; he meant “ever.”
153[168]: I think it’s clear from the evidence presented in this book, that Kirby first developed a “Silver Spider”-based idea for a “Spiderman.” Kirby produced a presentation board with notes about the character. And Ditko’s certain that Stan showed him the first five pages of Jack’s original Spiderman story, which feature a different looking hero on the splash page than the one we know today. So let’s imagine how a similar interview with Kirby, being asked these same questions and adopting Lee’s attitude, might’ve gone… Here’s a key factor: Kirby didn’t have the same attitude as Lee about it. He repeatedly gave Ditko credit in his comments over the years. It looks to me that Stan views any involvement after an initial idea in someone’s head, as superfluous to the “creation”—and if you take that reasoning to its logical conclusion, Lee would be superfluous in Spider-Man’s creation.
A nice touch. There’s a better case that Spider-Man was a Kirby-Ditko co-creation, and that Lee was the Baldo Smudge-like go-between.
Tuk made a similar observation regarding creation claims: “Both Lee and Kirby have described their version of how the Fantastic Four came about. We could examine their particular claims (see appendix 2) but we don’t even need to go that far. Whenever Lee talks about the origin of the Fantastic Four… [he] talks about himself for half the time. Then he talks about the surface details: these characters have superpowers. He then talks about what made them different in the most abstract way: they had real emotions and problems, but which emotions? Which problems? Why should a reader care? Now compare how Kirby describes what happened… note how Kirby talks about the underlying motivations, the feelings, what made each individual character different. Kirby knows what drives the characters as individuals, and hence where conflicts would arise. So who is more likely to have written these conflicts? Lee or Kirby?” 8
154[169]: Here’s my problem with this: If Lee wrote this synopsis before ever even mentioning the concept for the Fantastic Four to Jack as he’s claimed, how can he not be sure whose idea it was to originally keep Sue permanently invisible? It’s right there in Stan’s synopsis, so it has to be his idea if he hadn’t talked to Jack about it prior to writing it.
Exactly. Unfortunately Morrow’s skepticism doesn’t come across in other places in the book.
back4 Kate Willaert, “Early Days of Marvel – Release Schedule,” kirbywithoutwords blog, 21 February 2016.
back5 Steve Sherman by email to Patrick Ford, 2018.
back6 Robert L. Beerbohm, “Secret Origins of the Direct Market,” Part One, Comic Book Artist #6, Fall 1999, and Part Two, Comic Book Artist #7, February 2000.
Stuf’ Said p 4: Lee’s m.o. was giving characters “hang-ups,” like Iron Man’s weak heart, Daredevil’s blindness, Spider-Man’s—well, acne, heartburn, post-nasal drip, allergies, chronic halitosis, and a dozen other maladies, depending on what Stan Lee interview you were reading.
“Lee’s m.o.”: this statement assumes facts not supported by the evidence. In this case, Lee says it’s his m.o.: Kirby had squabbling teammates in The Newsboy Legion, Boy Commandos, Boys’ Ranch, The Three Rocketeers, and Challengers of the Unknown; the science involved tells us Iron Man’s weak heart was undoubtedly built into Kirby’s concept pages/origin story; Daredevil’s blindness was introduced by Bill Everett; and it’s easily proven that the emphasis on non-action scenes in Amazing Spider-Man was supplied by Steve Ditko.
Ditko wrote that Lee wanted more costumed fighting and less interaction of Peter Parker at school: “Stan Lee did not like my playing up the school context, of using panels with Peter Parker (PP) being involved with his classmates. He wanted Spider-man (S-m) to get into action as fast and as often as possible. Stan rightly believed that the costumed hero is what the comic book is all about–a costumed hero in action. But PP/S-m, a teenage hero, should be seen, understood, in his teenage context, environment. His normal (non-hero) life can’t just be shown in some brief transitional sequences between a number of hero/villain clashes.” 9
Much like Susan Kirby’s “Sue Storm” story covered by Morrow (Stuf’ Said p 21), Wendy Everett told Blake Bell that her dad added Daredevil’s blindness because his daughter was legally blind. After the claim was brought to his attention, Morrow seemingly grudgingly included it as a possibility in the second edition [37]: “although in real life, the daughter of the new strip’s artist Bill Everett is legally blind, so it may’ve evolved from that.” (Blindness remains on Lee’s list of creations at the start of the book.)
Lee further made it known to and through his readers that he was the one who instilled humanity in the characters and made them individuals with his dialogue, but this is laughable. Lee was the great homogenizer: his male hero dialogue is interchangeable between titles. You can verify this by reading it aloud.
KIRBY’S CONTRIBUTION
4: As the 1960s wore on, Jack was doing more of the work, via the “Marvel Method,” where the “artist” was responsible for much/most/all of the plotting and pacing of the stories, while the “writer” concentrated on the words in the caption boxes and balloons, after the drawn pages were completed and the story totally fleshed out.
Kirby maintained that he worked this way from the start; what evolved was his method of conveying his written story to Lee. Prior to margin notes, Kirby wrote in the balloons or explained the pages in detail to Lee in person (necessitating Lee’s margin notes). He instituted margin notes to avoid face-to-face story conferences when the situation became intolerable. Lee encouraged the idea that margin notes marked his decision to give Kirby “free rein” because it gave Lee unlimited credit for the writing up to that point.
LEE’S PERSONALITY
5: From the start of his career, Lee’s personality won people over. Co-workers mostly adored him while he spent two decades cranking out unremarkable stories for Marvel, beginning in 1941. But until Kirby and Ditko arrived in the late 1950s, there were no notable characters created by him, super-hero or otherwise.
“Lee’s personality won people over”: Morrow has given us the Disnified version of Lee. Contrary to this depiction, Lee’s personality did not win him any friends at work.
Paul Wardle: “Harvey Kurtzman claimed that Lee would return his original art to him (strips such as Hey! Look! that Timely published in the 1940s) only after drawing a big ‘X’ through them with a black grease pencil. He also said Lee would sit on top of a filing cabinet and force the employees to bow to him on their way to work. Stan was reportedly an ‘enfant terrible’ in those days, having been promoted when still a teenager by publisher Martin Goodman after the departure of Simon and Kirby.” 10 Rick Veitch accurately captured this side of Lee with his Funky-like portrayal of the team Stanley Burr and Jack Curtis in Boy Maximortal #1.
Stanley Burr in Rick Veitch’s Boy Maximortal #1.
Wallace Wood (years with Lee: 1964-65): I enjoyed working with Stan on DAREDEVIL but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing and I was being paid for drawing but he didn’t have any ideas. I’d go in for a plotting session and we’d just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. 11
52[56] Wallace Wood: “I want the credit (and the money) for everything I do! And I resent guys like Stan Lee more than I can say! He’s my reason for living… I want to see that no-talent bum get his…” (Sometime between 1976–1981: Wallace Wood’s letter to John Hitchcock)
Gerry Conway: Stan has always had that quality of kindly insensitivity. I think he’s basically a nice guy, he wants to be a nice guy, he does want to be nice to his employees, but I don’t think he’s terribly sensitive. If he is made aware of you as an individual, he’ll probably be very nice, but making him aware of you as an individual is the problem. He’s kind of self-centered in that regard… 12
John Romita: Around 1957 was when Stan and I were at our lowest ebb in our relationship. In the last year, he cut my rate every time I turned in a story. He was not even talking to me then… 13
Roy Thomas (1965- ): “By the time I was there, Steve Ditko never came by the office except for a couple of minutes to drop something off, because Stan had decided that there was just no sense in the two of them speaking…” 14
Wood, Romita, and Ditko all cited Lee’s silent treatment. Ditko wrote 50 years after the fact that it’s what drove him away.
John Romita: So I called up Zena Brody, the romance editor at DC—she was a nice girl and a pretty good editor, too—and told her I couldn’t do any more for her, and she was very upset. She said, “Gee, I was counting on you.” She was talking about doing a steady series with me. I told her, “I’m sorry, but Stan Lee is giving me the bulk of my work.” She said, “We’ll try to get you more work.” But I said, “I have to decide now because I can’t gamble. If you can’t give me the work Stan is giving me, then I’ll be out.” And then, six months later, he let me go through his secretary… when it came time that he ran out of money and had to shut down, or cut down to the bone, I had done two or three days’ work, ruling up the pages, lettering the balloons, and blocking in the figures on a story—and here comes a call from his assistant… and she says, “John, I have to tell you that Stan says to stop work on the Western book because we’re going to cut down on a lot of titles.” I said to her, “Well, I spent three days on it. I’d like to get $100 for the work, to tide me over.” She said, “Okay, I’ll mention it to Stan.” I never heard another word about the money, and I told Virginia, “If Stan Lee ever calls, tell him to go to hell.” [laughs] And that was the last work I did for him until 1965… 13
Michael J Vassallo, Snyder-Ditko Appreciation Society (group), 22 September 2018: I’ve probably spoken to as many ex-creative staff from the 1940’s and 1950’s than anyone has. The preponderance of the attitudes was that Stan was a lord-it-over type boss. That’s not my opinion, it’s what I got from others. Sure some say “Stan was great”, but more said he was not. Numerous accounts exist of Stan pretending to fire people in the 1940’s and then saying he was only joking. Read Cal Massey’s interview where he relates how Stan would sing “massas in the cold, cold ground” when he (an African American) would come up to pick up a script. There’s Stan telling Jaffee to watch his ass because some new artist was possibly going to replace him (Jaffee quit on the spot). It goes on and on. Things like that. They far outweigh the better stories about Stan. Things like that are black and white. No opinions or guessing or interpolation is needed.
Jim Amash interviewed Cal Massey (1951-57) for Alter Ego #105, October 2011.
MASSEY: I walked into the room and Stan Lee said, “Massey’s in the cold, cold ground.” I sat down, and he said, “Messy Massey.” Then I got up and started to leave, when Stan asked me where I was going. I said, “I thought New York had grown past this sort of thing. Have a nice day.” Then, Stan said, “Massey, get your ass back here. How many stories can you turn out a month?” Of course, after that, he could say anything to me. [mutual laughter]
JA: Explain to me the “Massey’s in the cold, cold ground” reference.
MASSEY: Stan was making a play on the lyrics of a song from the South that was written during slavery times, and I didn’t like it. He explained that to me, saying, “I just wanted to see what kind of character you had.”
JA: Stan Goldberg told me he was let go at the end of 1949, too. This is the way I understand it: every week, somebody was let go, and eventually everyone was let go. It was building up to a mass firing. Rudy Lapick is sure of the date because he got married in May 1948, and when he came back from his honeymoon, he discovered he was out of a job… What made it tough for Rudy is that he said Stan used to come up to him and, as a joke, say, “You’re fired.” He didn’t like being teased like that.
JAFFEE: Oh, Stan teased people like that all the time. I liked Stan and we got along pretty well, but it’s like a marriage. You like certain things about the person you’re with, and you’re not crazy about other things. Stan toyed with people, including me, without realizing that underlings get very scared when someone they depend on for their living is joking about things that may affect the way they make their living. But I would have to put it in a certain context. I don’t think Stan ever did anything to be cruel. It was just his sense of humor; he wanted to get a rise out of you, that’s all. If Stan were apprised of the fact that the person’s feelings were hurt, he would instantly say, “Oh, gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
JA: I’m sure of that. But it’s one thing if the staffers tease you, and another if the boss does…
JAFFEE: […] Stan was always half-joking, but sometimes people would take it the wrong way and think he was making fun of them, or shaking them up, or trying to get them to worry about shaping up, because he would make a joke. In this instance, his joke was, “Al, you’d better look to your laurels. Look what someone just did as a sample.” Someone had just done a sample for Patsy Walker, and he showed it to me. It was a beautiful piece of work. Stan continued in that vein, “Well, you know, you’re going to have to measure up to this stuff.” The guy he was talking about eventually ended up being one of his top artists. I said, “Stan, I don’t want this to sound bad or anything, but I think you ought to give one of my books to this guy.” I was dead-tired and a little bit angry. Then I said, “Why don’t you give this guy the book I just brought in? I have to go now. I’m very tired.” I gave Stan the pages and drove home. When I got home, my wife said that Stan called, and was sorry and didn’t mean what he’d said—that it was just sort-of a joke that went wrong. I called Stan and said, “I think I’ve had it with doing Patsy Walker anyway. I’m finished with Patsy Walker.” [Jaffee quit.]
Daniel Keyes (1952-55): “Well, Stan was tall, skinny. And the shyest person I had ever met up until that time. He would not talk to anyone. He’d hole up in his back office… That shyness. He was very supercilious. He was way above all of us. I think Martin Goodman looked down on him. I intuited that. So I think, in a sense, Stan kicked people below him.” 16
KATZ: Extremely efficient, cold, indifferent, and unmoving.
JA: That’s very unlike the image we all have of Stan.
KATZ: He had a serious attitude, almost arrogant.
Roy Thomas: The thing that was truest in that article was the analysis that Marvel has had a tendency in recent years to be very vindictive toward people who leave it to work for the competition. They go far beyond any kind of professional reaction. Stan generally has reasonably good and humane instincts, but once in a while he’ll just decide that if somebody does something, he’s never going to work for Marvel again. He did this with Len, and with Gerry, though to date he’s never said it about me. 18
65[71]: After this sees print, that summer, Burgos’ daughter sees her father destroy everything he has pertaining to his comic book career.
Susan Burgos: “I never saw his collection until the day he threw it all out… there was a whole pile of stuff in the yard… I got the impression that he either lost the case or something else had happened pertaining to it… I grew up believing that he came up with this fabulous idea, and that Stan Lee took it from him.”
Stan Lee to Nat Freedland, New York Herald Tribune, 9 January 1966: “Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world,” and, “He just drops off the finished pages with notes at the margins and I fill in the dialogue.” [Ditko didn’t use margin notes, and he was already gone at the time of this interview.]
Stan Lee, speech, Princeton University, March 1966: Now we just lost the artist that does “Doc Strange,” Steve Ditko, who also does Spider-Man. [audience gasps and hisses] I feel as badly about it as you do. He’s a very… peculiar guy. [audience laughs] He’s a great talent, but he’s a little eccentric. Anyway, I haven’t spoken to this guy for over a year. He mails in the work, and I write the stories, and that’s the way he liked to work it. One day he just phoned and he said “That’ll be it.”
Note that Lee had altered the story in just two months: Ditko, having quit before the January interview, was getting increasingly difficult to work with, despite no longer being there. Lee then deputized Romita, who’d never spoken to Ditko, to spread the message that Ditko had been difficult. By 1975, Ditko would go from “peculiar and eccentric” (rich coming from Lee but endearing to his fans), to being Hitler to Lee’s Chamberlain (see p 118 under Lee misrepresents).
From the ‘40s until the early ‘70s, people had Lee’s number. See the Dean Latimer review (p 112 under Further Information).
TURNING POINT!
5: Then suddenly, groundbreaking new series and characters started appearing from 1961–1965, due to an epiphany he had (brought on by the urging of his wife).
“the urging of his wife” leading to “groundbreaking new series and characters”: The Cadence Industries propaganda machine swung into action with Lee as its front man. The FF creation stories began shortly after the acquisition of Marvel, designed to deflect attention from the inconvenient presence of the FF precursor at DC, Challengers of the Unknown.
Lee: Personally, I was bored. I had 20 years of writing and editing comics behind me. Twenty years of “Take that, you rat!” and “So, you wanna play, huh?” Twenty years of worrying whether a sentence or phrase might be over the head of an eight-year-old reader. Twenty years of trying to think like a child. And then an off-hand remark by my wife caused a revolution in comics tantamount to the invention of the wheel. Eighteen simple words, electrifying in their eloquence and their portent for the future. Each momentous syllable is engraved in my memory:
“When are you going to stop writing for kids and write stories that you yourself would enjoy reading?”
It was a casual question, posed in a casual way, but it really rocked me. It made me suddenly realize that I had never actually written anything for myself. For two unsatisfying decades I’d been selling myself short, sublimating any literary ability I might have in a painful effort to write down to the level of drooling juveniles and semicretins.
“Nevermore!” I shouted. “Nevermore will I fashion my tales for the nameless, faceless ‘them’ out there. Henceforth, I will write for an audience of one; an audience I should have no trouble pleasing, for I certainly know what turns me on.” 20
Lee: “The top sellers varied from month to month, in cycles. Romance books, mystery books. We followed the trend. When war books were big, we put out war books. Then one day my wife came to me and said, ‘You’ve got to stop kidding yourself. This is your work. You’ve got to put yourself into it.’ So I did.”21
Citing the latter quote, Morrow himself revealed the key to the timing of these stories:
108[118]: This [1971] article also contains the first instance I’ve found of Stan giving credit to his wife Joan for pushing him to put more of himself into his comics work.
Jason Goodman framed the story differently…
“Stan Lee said he was gonna quit. This one is easiest to disprove with evidence and even Stans own words. In the early 70s Stan’s story was that Miss Joan said ‘when will you realize this is permanent’ not ‘do it your own way’.” 22
After noting the problem with the timing of the Joan Lee story, Morrow admitted it as evidence.
Lee: Be that as it may, Martin mentioned that he had noticed one of the titles published by National Comics seemed to be selling better than most. It was a book called The Justice League of America and was composed of a team of superheroes. Well, we didn’t need a house to fall on us. “If The Justice League is selling,” spake he, “why don’t we put out a comic book that features a team of superheroes?”23
124[136]: [Lee] “He said to me, ‘You know, Stan, I found out that DC Comics has a book called the Justice League, and it’s selling pretty well. Maybe we ought to do a book with a lot of superheroes.’”
As with the Joan Lee item, it’s instructive to look for a mention of the JLA story predating the early ‘70s when Lee and his ghostwriters were preparing Origins of Marvel Comics: there are none. The TwoMorrows book, The Stan Lee Universe, collects a number of Lee interviews, but has only a single mention of the JLA story: the Jay Maeder interview, purportedly from Comics Feature in 1974 (also printed in Alter Ego #74), the same year the tale appeared in Origins. It is perhaps a strange circumstance that the Maeder interview also contains a version of the Joan Lee story, one much closer to the way Jason Goodman would relate it decades later:
Lee: …my wife said to me one day, Stan, when are you gonna realize this is permanent? And instead of looking to do something sensational in some other field, why don’t you make something sensational about what you’re doing? I mean, you’re writing, you are creating…do something really good.
Back on p 19 in the second edition, Morrow has prefaced the section on Kirby’s “blitz” story with yet another Lee JLA quote. In both editions, he cleverly displayed the cover of The Brave and the Bold #28 (first appearance of the JLA) on the same page as that of FF #1. Morrow is slyly suggesting, as early ‘70s Marvel re-historians would have you believe, that one was the inspiration for the other. Left out is the one that predates both by more than two years, the one that those historians were trying to suppress: the obvious inspiration for the B&B cover, and the direct antecedent to the Fantastic Four.
The more obvious reality is that the inspiration for the Fantastic Four was the Challengers of the Unknown rather than the JLA, and Lee’s mid-career revival was inspired, not by his wife, but by Jack Kirby.
SCRIPTS
15: JOE SINNOTT: “…He did full scripts for every story he wrote during the 1950s until the Comics Code Authority pushed the comic book industry into near bankruptcy and oblivion. He really is a prodigious, tireless worker.”
Sinnott’s statement is at odds with the evidence which suggests Lee trafficked in the scripts of others but didn’t write them himself. The Atlas Tales website lists credits for Lee, signed and/or speculative, and Michael Vassallo has extensively catalogued Lee’s writing.
Michael J. Vassallo, The Marvel Method group, 7 May 2019: “My discussion with Joe [Sinnott] this weekend included me telling him that all the stories Stan Lee gave him from the pile of scripts on Lee’s desk were written by other writers, not Stan himself. Joe didn’t even realize this, as didn’t Bernie Krigstein, who assumed those tepid post-code fantasy stories he drew, were Stan’s, just because Stan handed them out.”
KEYES: At first I just edited them. Writers would come in. I would bring the synopses in to Stan. He would choose a number of them, but I was the front man. I would sit up front. I would deal with the script writers, the artists. They would bring the stuff to me. I would bring them back to Stan. I was a go-between. Eventually, I started writing them. And I was pretty good at it… We worked our asses off. I’d get the synopses. I’d read them, and select a number, bring them to Stan. He would then weed them out again. He had a regular stable, so we gave preference to those. Usually, they were all written by the same writers…
WM: Stan Lee is today considered one of the great comic book writers. Was he writing many comics in those days?
KEYES: Not to my knowledge. He edited, I guess. He was a businessman, as far as I was concerned. And a shy businessman is almost an oxymoron. I’ve never thought of Stan as a writer at all. So that surprises me. Of course, he might have been turning in comics for a few extra bucks, doing it under pen names so that Martin Goodman wouldn’t know about it. I never thought of Stan as a writer. He says that he created Spider-Man. I never thought of him as a creative person. It could be that one of the writers created it and sent in a synopsis. And it got picked up. But of course he’s become a multi-millionaire for that stuff. 24
Steve Ditko: “Lee never wrote a full script for any work I did at Marvel.” 25
PLOT OUTLINES
27[28]: Kirby draws Fantastic Four #8 this month, working from a partial synopsis for the first 13 pages which is known to exist; Lee sends it to fan Jerry Bails in late 1963, and it appears in his fanzine Capa Alpha #2. But the Puppet Master ending is an almost exact copy of a 1951 Black Magic #4 story Kirby drew titled “Voodoo on Tenth Avenue.” So Kirby is heavily involved in at least the plotting of #8’s final chapter, if not the entire book.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Late 1963 puts it over a year after the fact. Kirby cannot be determined to have “worked from a partial plot outline” simply because one is known to exist: why give it a free pass? The FF #8 “synopsis” is an even bigger fraud than that for FF #1 (see p 69 below): the one for the origin may have been re-purposed in the ‘90s but this one, whether written immediately after the story conference or immediately before mailing, was used to misrepresent the writing process to Bails. Yes, Kirby plotted the entire book because Lee was not someone who plotted stories for Kirby.
37[40]: Over the November 28 Thanksgiving holiday, Roy Thomas sees the partial plot synopsis for Fantastic Four #8 (typed circa April 1962) at Jerry Bails’ home. Stan Lee had recently sent it to him (probably on November 18, as a handwritten cover letter from that date exists saying, “Jerry, so where’s our trophy? The FF”). This is the issue that features an ending nearly identical to a 1954 Kirby Black Magic story.
“typed circa April 1962” assumes facts not in evidence. “Roy Thomas sees the partial plot synopsis for Fantastic Four #8 at Jerry Bails’ home.” Where, when, and with whom Thomas encountered the item is undoubtedly cemented in his memory because of other events that week, but what does it prove?
Thomas having seen the “partial plot synopsis” in person proves:
it was typed before it was mailed to Bails, and presumably on or before the 18th.
it was mailed over a year after FF #8’s publication date (9th August 1962).
it was typed no later than 28th November 1963, when Thomas saw it.
Thomas having seen the “partial plot synopsis” in person does not prove:
Lee typed it before Bails requested it.
Lee typed it before a story conference with Kirby. *
Lee typed it.
Kirby ever saw it.
* the recurring event where Kirby maintained he typically imparted a story to Lee.
The existence of the plot outlines doesn’t automatically indicate proof of creation, or pre-pencilling plotting. They’re only seen or found in Lee’s desk or office rather than in Kirby’s possession (where they’d be expected given their stated purpose), but location aside, there’s still nothing to indicate that Lee typed anything before Kirby gave him the plot. Like any of the typed notes ever mentioned by Lee, Thomas, or Flo Steinberg, they are at best the record of story conferences (see also p 66 below). At worst they’re after-the-fact fabrications.
The end of the story is missing from #8’s outline, which is convenient because as Morrow noted, the ending is verifiably all Kirby. Thomas offers abundant explanations for this. He later suggests (p 69[75]) that Stuf’ Said readers can play at home by filling in their own explanation for the #1 outline’s logical deficiencies. He cautions against falling for the obvious and most likely answer.
64[70]: Stan Lee goes on his first-ever vacation (likely needing a break after the loss of Ditko, and the stress with Kirby over the New York Herald Tribune article), and leaves Kirby to both draw and dialogue the S.H.I.E.L.D. story for Strange Tales #148 after plotting the story together. Lee noted in an interview: [Lee] “I [did] a little editing later, but it was [Kirby’s] story.”
81[87]: Discussing the 1966 Strange Tales #148 story Kirby dialogued: [Lee] “We had both plotted that out before I left, but he put the copy in on that one…”
“after plotting the story together” assumes facts not in evidence. Lee wasn’t a plotter. “We had both plotted that out before I left” means they had a story conference, which means the plotting was done by the usual plotter.
Richard Kyle: “By the way, in discussing just what Jack did and what Stan did, no one seems to refer to that SHIELD story in Strange Tales #148, mentioned by the San Diego panel in another connection. In an editorial, Lee mentions specifically that Jack was going to write the story while Stan took a vacation. I recall turning to the story, wondering if it would be different from the regular SHIELD yarns, and being a little surprised that it read the same as the others—which I had believed Lee wrote… By that time, I realized that Lee was simply a dialogue writer, not a story writer…” 26
69[75]: [Roy Thomas] “…I saw Stan’s plot for Fantastic Four #1, but even Stan would never claim for sure that he and Jack hadn’t talked the idea over before he wrote this.”
On this page Morrow gives Thomas carte blanche to defend the FF #1 plot; he also lays out a couple of issues he has with the document, here and on p 156[169]. The year after the above interview, even before Lee signed his new contract, Thomas was persuaded to walk back his cynicism. Neither Lee nor Thomas is known to have addressed the issue of chapter breaks in plot outlines.
FF PLOT TIMELINE
1963: Lee sends plot outline of #8 to Bails, and leads Bails to believe he “writes a one-page synopsis of an entire FF story.” 27
“Late-1960s”: in 1998, Thomas says this is when he saw the FF #1 outline in Lee’s office (he has since revised it to 1966, the date Morrow cites). Coincidentally, PF&C acquired Marvel in 1968 and needed proof of ownership of the properties; on p 69[75] Morrow calls this coincidence a conspiracy theory.
1974: Lee writes that he wrote a “detailed first synopsis” to present his revolutionary creation to Kirby.
1991: in FF #358, Marvel prints what’s later described as the retyped version of the #1 outline, in response to Kirby’s TCJ interview that was published the previous year.
1998 (see Lieber comes into his own, below): the #1 “actual document” is reproduced in Alter Ego v2#2, provided as a photocopy by Lee, by mail.
Steve Webb, Snyder-Ditko Appreciation Society (group), 12 September 2019: If the document had existed when Goodman sold the company, it would have been introduced then. If it had existed when Kirby was presented with the special waiver to get his art back in 1985, it would have been produced then. If it had existed when Kirby gave the most blunt of his TCJ interviews in the early 90s, it would have been introduced then.
69[75]: [Mark Evanier] “[FF #1] feels an awful lot more like Jack’s earlier work than anything that Stan had done to that date. So I find it very difficult to believe…”
If not Evanier’s, then Kirby’s should be the last word on the subject:
GROTH: Stan says he conceptualized virtually everything in The Fantastic Four – that he came up with all the characters. And then he said that he wrote a detailed synopsis for Jack to follow.
ROZ KIRBY: I’ve never seen anything.
KIRBY: I’ve never seen it, and of course I would say that’s an outright lie. 28
Strangely the TCJ quote (above) doesn’t appear in Stuf’ Said.
66[72]: Above is Stan Lee’s plot synopsis for stories Kirby would’ve been starting around March 1966… You have to assume this was given to Jack, prior to him beginning work on any of these stories, and it’s fascinating to see how he took these basic ideas, and built multi-issue arcs out of them—great stories, but they aren’t regarded as his most pivotal work.
Or, and there’s just as much evidence to support this hypothesis, you could “have to assume” that Lee took notes of Kirby plots and had someone type them. (More circumstantial evidence even, because multiple witnesses—including Lee—describe notes being taken, by Thomas and Steinberg, for example, during non-Kirby story conferences.)
Morrow takes a page out of Thomas’ book: the proof that Lee’s “synopsis” came first is in describing what Kirby did with it. Clearly Lee did the synopsis “prior to [Kirby] beginning work on any of these stories” (a phrase that looks like it was shoehorned into the sentence by a lawyer), but oh, look at the wonderful things Kirby did with Lee’s basic ideas, only proving that Lee’s ideas came first. With no evidence to support Morrow’s sequence of events, “you have to assume.”
95[103]: Gene Colan: “Stan had taken on a huge writing load because the company had, a few years earlier, been having financial problems, and he decided to write most of his scripts. But he didn’t have time to sit down and type out a full-blown script, so he would dictate it to me over the telephone, and I would record it with a tape recorder or a wire recorder.”
Lee was provably less busy than before the financial problems. In addition, Gene Colan is not Jack Kirby and is thus disqualified from having his recollection applied to Kirby’s experience with Lee.
ART DIRECTOR
102[112]: Romita will eventually assume the role of Marvel’s art director, but Lee at this time has someone else in mind…
Assumes facts not in evidence. The most accurate statement that could be made here is that decades later Lee claimed he had Kirby in mind. Romita says it’s an honorary title rather than a paid position (see below). Is it necessary even to say anything else to put this fantasy to rest?
102[112]: [Lee] “The one thing I remember and felt bad about when Jack left, was that I had been thinking about—and maybe I even talked to him about it—that I wanted to make Jack my partner in a sense; I wanted him to be the art director and I thought that he could serve in that function and I would serve as the editor.”
Aside from the litany of reasons Kirby could never be art director, this quote needs to be accompanied by the immediate rebuttal from Thomas:
Roy: Also, with Jack being in California, there would have been a geographical problem. 29
Morrow’s mild suggestion that Kirby wouldn’t have been interested treats the alleged incident as though it actually happened. The story should have been dismissed for what it was, a fabrication.
SPURGEON: Another thing that’s unclear to me when I’m tracking your career: at what point did you officially become an art director?
ROMITA: [laughs] It was never official. It was a handshake. It was so unofficial that Stan used to be paid as art director. I never got a penny for being art director.
SPURGEON: That’s not a very good arrangement at all.
ROMITA: I used to say that Stan would give titles instead of salary increases. He would call a person an assistant editor, but not give them a raise. He used to give us nicknames instead of raises. [laughter] That’s why I got so many nicknames. 30
116[128]: On the creation of the Fantastic Four, Origins of Marvel Comics gives what could be Stan’s most accurate, concise account ever of the sequence of events: [Lee] “After kicking it around with Martin and Jack for a while, I decided to call our quaint quartet The Fantastic Four. I wrote a detailed first synopsis for Jack to follow, and the rest is history.”
“most accurate”? Assumes facts not in evidence. While Roy Thomas seems to forget the existence of this quote (see Lieber comes into his own, p 69), Lee is denying the existence of Kirby’s concept sketches. Morrow has been definite up to this point about the concept art, so why not call Lee out at this point for revising history?
LEE’S CONTRIBUTION
159[174]: At the very least, without Lee’s input and sometimes reining in Kirby’s most outlandish ideas, the Marvel books wouldn’t have sold, Jack would have been looking for work elsewhere, and we’d have never gotten far enough along to see a “Galactus Trilogy” or Black Panther debut to argue about.
Morrow is repeating a myth here. The most that can be said about Lee’s contribution is that things might not have been as successful without his “voice” in the comics and his promotion in the text pages. As Tuk shows repeatedly, Lee’s “reining in” amounted to the destruction of solid storytelling by someone who didn’t understand it. He also shows that Lee “collaborating” with Kirby yielded sales numbers to match Kirby’s immediate pre-Marvel figures, and surmises Kirby would have had respectable sales numbers in the ’60s with or without Lee’s involvement. Kirby saw it as his job to make sales, and he knew how to do it using his storytelling skills; as he proved by clumsily dismantling a lot of those stories, Lee was just throwing stuff against the wall.
“Lee’s input.”
Darrell Epp, The Marvel Method group, 20 May 2019: “ONE gene colan draws a road block. TWO lee forcibly inserts a caption box that says, “That is a road block!” THREE lee tricks millions he’s a writer, and not just a writer, but america’s own mythmaker, what a sweet scam.”
Patrick Ford, same discussion: “Not only, ‘It’s a roadblock (sic).’ Also, ‘A barricade thrown across the road.’ Lee does this constantly. More often than any writer I can think of. This was described in the early ’60s by Jerry Bails who wrote that Lee’s Marvel Method writing consisted of Lee describing the action which was already evident to the reader, and making wisecracks. Perhaps the most succinct description of Lee’s writing ever. And done prior to Lee being canonized.
Jerry Bails: Captions must be limited largely to describing the action in the box, and dialogue must consist mainly of wisecracks, both of which can be added directly to the pencilled drawings. 31
In TJKC #66, John Morrow and Shane Foley showed Kirby’s script and Lee’s resulting dialogue for a page of the 1978 Silver Surfer graphic novel. Here’s page 20, panel 5.
Pencilled.
Finished.
Kirby’s script.Lee’s script.
Michael J Vassallo, Marvel Method group, 2 September 2019: This pretty much in a nutshell sums up the “Marvel Method” that can be extrapolated backwards to the vast majority of silver age Marvel. The advantage here is we have both Jack’s original art with notes, Jack’s typed detailed notes accompanying the art, and Stan’s minimal contribution. All three for the world to see.
Patrick Ford, same discussion: Note how Lee undercuts Kirby’s intent. Kirby says the Surfer’s eye blazes with a steady flame. Lee writes that the spark begins to die.
Dave Rawlins, Marvel Method group, 10 September 2019: Stan Lee’s attitude displayed in his description of what set Marvel Comics apart reveals a serious disconnect with the intentions and goals of Ditko and Kirby. While they were creating comics aimed at young readers they strove to tell serious adventure tales. Lee would have us believe it was all a put on, a pop-art production, if you will. I suppose it WAS a put on for him.
accordingtokirby 