The Earl Wells article, “Once and for all, who was the author of Marvel?” was published in The Comics Journal #181 (October 1995), and later updated for inclusion in The Comics Journal Library, Volume One: Jack Kirby, published in 2002. Let’s have a look at some of his misguided observations.
Wells gets into trouble right off the bat.
Stan Lee, long renowned as the writer who revolutionized superhero comics through unusual, more believable characterizations, natural-sounding dialogue, and a freshly ironic view of super-heroism, is in some circles now viewed merely as a spotlight-hungry huckster whose only creativity was leached from the talent of his staff. Jack Kirby, in those same circles, is now seen as an unsung genius who was the true author of Marvel, rather than as a gifted artists and storyteller who gave life to Lee’s ideas.
This is backwards. In the ’60s and up until his reinvention by Cadence in 1974 (other than in the minds of the members of the cult he created), Lee was seen as the industry’s buffoon. He was heckled at Carnegie Hall and booed at conventions. It was widely known that he signed his name to other people’s work. Things only began to swing Lee’s way when he rewrote Marvel’s history in Origins of Marvel Comics and in magazine interviews, where he neglected to credit the creator/writers of the work.
Lee’s reputation did take a hit in the 1980s during Marvel’s original art debacle, when he was perceived to have done nothing to help Kirby. His instinct for self-preservation told him that speaking up might have jeopardized any substantial stolen art holdings he may be concealing. For the last time, a number of industry insiders spoke up for Kirby.
Kirby’s own stock among those fair-weather friends plummeted when he laid out the truth in his TCJ interview, published in 1990. It wasn’t the first time Kirby told the whole truth, but it may have been the first time the cult members took notice. Lee capitalized by preaching his creation myths to an internal audience in Marvel publications. Then starting in 1998 (coincidentally the year Lee was fired by Marvel), he took the message to the outside world with the help of Roy Thomas in Alter Ego.
Kirby was dead, Lee’s brother Larry Lieber was retroactively nominated as long lost writer for the stories of Kirby’s that Lee couldn’t possibly have had time for, and Joe Simon joined the revisionism party. Simon and Lee publicly admitted they taught each other everything they knew, and that was how to achieve great wealth on the back of the talent.
For many years Marvel propaganda has it that Stan Lee was the true creator of the Marvel superheroes of the 1960s, with Kirby merely the artist assigned to carry out instructions. The now dominant revisionist view is that Kirby was the presiding genius of the new superhero format.
This is nonsense, and Wells gives it away in the opening phrase: “Marvel propaganda has it…” The “revisionist view” that Kirby was “the presiding genius” was neither revisionist, nor dominant. It was the propaganda that was revisionist, prompted by Kirby quitting Lee in 1970.
Over 30 years after the publication of the first of the heralded superhero works credited to Lee and Kirby, The Fantastic Four #1, (dated November 1961), it may be impossible to determine what really happened. The memories of the two principals have almost always been spotty at best, and as we shall see, the historical record is sketchy.
“impossible to determine” is false, and “memories of the two principals” being spotty is propaganda from the Lee side: Kirby’s memory wasn’t spotty. As Steve Ditko has written in numerous essays, Lee claimed a poor memory to deflect from the fact that he wasn’t telling the truth. If someone who knew the facts called him on a false statement, he could blame it on his memory.
But there is one source that might reveal the truth.
Wells cites the 1966 Nat Freedland article from the New York Herald Tribune.
When Marvel first attracted media attention in the 1960s, Stan Lee was the chief company spokesman, and he was generous in sharing credit for Marvel’s success with the artists, primarily Kirby and Steve Ditko, but also Don Heck, Dick Ayers, Bill Everett, and Wally Wood, among others.
This is more spin, and like many thousands of others, Wells had the wool pulled over his eyes. Lee was not “generous in sharing credit.” His credit boxes and public pronouncements were always geared toward crediting “his artists.” The truth is that Lee’s “artists” deserved to be credited (and paid) as the writers and in some cases the creators, but he was redirecting those rewards to his own pockets. A creator/writer/artist who was being sold to the world as only the artist had reason to see it as credit being taken away every time Lee opened his mouth. That’s not being generous.
Nat Freedland’s 1966 article for New York dealt in part with how the Marvel stories were created. Success had apparently already taken its toll as Freedland quotes Lee saying:
I don’t plot Spider-Man any more. Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stores. I guess I’ll leave him alone until sales start to slip. Since Spidey got so popular, Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over plotlines I told him to start making up his own stories. He won’t let anybody else ink his drawings either. He just drops off the finished pages with notes at the margins and I fill in the dialogue. I never know what he’ll come up with next, but it’s interesting to work that way.
It is not surprising that Ditko left the company about this time.
Lee is spinning the pending news of Ditko’s departure for Freedland: “if sales start to slip, I’ll fire his sorry ass.” This statement was made in the first week in January (some put it in December) but Lee knew Ditko had quit Marvel at Thanksgiving. It’s a stretch for Wells to characterize it as “about this time.”
“I told [Ditko] to start making up his own stories” means “Steve had been plotting since the early issues but when he demanded plot credit I stopped speaking to him. Since we weren’t communicating at all, I can no longer claim I was giving him the germ of an idea, but I claimed it anyway in my Comic Book Marketplace interview [#61].”
Freedland sat in on a plotting session between Lee and Kirby, and his account shows Lee as the dominant partner, although I have to wonder if Kirby’s seeming passivity was a sign of growing disenchantment on his part.
This wasn’t a plotting session. It was staged for Freedland and was likely Lee’s prototype for future unsuspecting Marvel Method artists. Ditko and Kirby never had a legitimate plotting session where Lee would “jump around.” Wallace Wood related his experience with Lee to Mark Evanier: “I’d go in for a plotting session and we’d just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline.”
Steve Sherman conveyed Kirby’s version of the interview: “Jack said that Stan basically put on a show. As Jack said, ‘Stanley was jumping on the desk, waving his arms like a crazy man. I just sat there on the couch and watched him. It was nutty. When it was over, I said a few words and went back to work. The article comes out and the guy writes what an amazing writer Stanley is. Who could work like that? By the time he was through jumping around, I had three pages done.'”
Chris Tolworthy touched on the act in his FF 51 essay:
TOLWORTHY: We are lucky to get two accidental glimpses into a story meeting around this time: one just before, one just after. For FF 48, Roy Thomas happened to be there when Lee famously said “who’s that guy?” about the Surfer. 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.
Read Tolworthy’s essay here.
Wells goes on to quote Freedland quoting Lee and Kirby:
“The Silver Surfer has been somewhere out in space since he helped the F.F. stop Galactus from destroying the Earth,” begins Lee. “Why don’t we bring him back?”
“Ummh,” says Kirby.
Freedland, then Wells, make an issue of Kirby’s “Ummh” to characterize him as the slow member of the team. Allow me to translate: Galactus relegated the Surfer to Earth, but Lee has him roaming space. Kirby’s “Ummh” means, “Stanley, you just said something remarkably stupid, but I’m going to refrain from contradicting you in front of this reporter.”
Freedland in New York magazine called it the “super heroes with super problems” approach…
(Lee may have been grandstanding for the reporter, but Robin Green, who once worked for Lee, wrote an account in Rolling Stone that briefly described Lee working with an artist in much the same way, and no reporter was present.)
It must have been suggested to Wells that the “story conference” was a fake, because he felt the need to add a corroborating account. But Robin Green never sat in on a story conference with Lee and either the first or second generation of Marvel Method “artists” (Kirby, Ditko, Wood, Romita). Available accounts of Lee’s grandstanding story conferences come from the post-Freedland generation (see Tom Sutton’s TCJ interview, for instance) where Robin Green was more likely to be able to sit in. Note that “synopses” by this time were probably notes of the grandstanding taken by Thomas or others and typed up later for the “artist,” as described in other interviews.
In Castle of Frankenstein, Lee talked to interviewer Ted White in somewhat greater detail about how a story is “brainstormed” with an artist, starting with a rough plot prepared by Lee:
Some artists, of course, need a more detailed plot than others. Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I’ll just say to Jack, ‘Let’s let the next villain be Dr. Doom,’ or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s so good at plots, I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All do is a little editing… I may tell him that he’s gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I’ll give him a plot, but we’re practically both the writers on the things.
Wells reproduces a long, rambling, largely fictitious account recorded in 1966, published in 1968, of how Lee conveys his brilliant ideas to various artists, sometimes with Thomas taking notes. Jack Kirby comes up with the ideas and does the writing without a plot, but Lee claims “we’re practically both the writers on the things.”
This account is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Lee almost made Kirby’s case for him!
Wells goes on to cite as proof of authorship that when film directors Federico Fellini and Alain Resnais came to town, they sought out Lee, the guy in the office, rather than go hunting for some freelancer. In Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean Howe quoted Josh Alan Friedman (“Mel Shestack Lives!,” Black Cracker Online, March 8, 2010):
When Marvel fan Federico Fellini, in New York to promote Juliet of the Spirits, swept into 625 Madison Avenue to meet Stan Lee, Men magazine editor Mel Shestack scoffed that Lee didn’t even know who Fellini was; years later, Shestack insisted that the director had quickly lost interest in Lee and cottoned instead to the more colorful magazine editors, who were themselves like “living comic books.”
In True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Abraham Riesman wrote about Lee’s relationship with Resnais:
In 1971, [Lee] finally made his play for Hollywood. He and Resnais concocted two film proposals. One was The Inmates… Stan and Resnais went further in developing their other movie idea, The Monster Maker. For this one, Stan even wrote a screenplay — one of the few times in his life that he’d written a full script for anything — and Resnais was aching to direct it… According to Stan, a producer bought the script for $25,000. But, in Stan’s retelling, the project fell apart when the producer demanded script changes and Resnais, refusing to let Stan’s work be insulted like that, walked away from the deal. Whether that’s true or not, the script never went anywhere, nor did the proposal for The Inmates.
Kirby’s feelings about Lee’s laurels were, I believe, first expressed in the early 1970s in a publication called Marvel Collector’s Handbook #1, although it was not published by Marvel.
Wells didn’t have access to Jack Kirby’s Own Words: a chronology (compiled by Rand Hoppe and posted on the Kirby Museum blog, The Kirby Effect). It lists no fewer than ten earlier interviews or articles. The 1968 Excelsior interview of Kirby and Lee, and Mark Hebert’s 1969 Kirby interview later published in The Nostalgia Journal, are both notable because Kirby was still selling work to Marvel at the time. From the Hebert interview:
KIRBY: 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: I created the Hulk, too, and saw him as a kind of handsome Frankenstein.
The suggestion that Kirby’s anger built over the years until the TCJ interview ignores the fact that his version was consistent throughout the twenty-plus year span. The interview by Leonard Pitts, Jr covered much of the same ground.
After touting the Freedland article as “the one source that might reveal the truth,” Wells gets to what he calls the surviving documentary evidence. For this he suggests two items: “a couple of pages of the plot synopsis of Fantastic Four #1,” and a page of original art with Kirby’s margin notes. Let’s take a look at these one at a time.
First, the “synopsis” pages. Wells notes that these were reproduced in Comics Interview #5 (July 1983), shortly after they had turned up in the Marvel office move.
a couple of pages of
When Roy Thomas reproduced the document in 1998, he identified the two pages as the object in its entirety.
the plot synopsis
The “synopsis” contains no plot. It’s a series of edits or notes possibly designed to present the concept to Martin Goodman, or to convince him that Lee’s typewriter was involved in the creation process.
The second piece of documentary evidence is the Thor page with Kirby’s margin notes, before inking and lettering. The page makes the workflow clear: Kirby drew the page and added notes explaining the action and suggesting dialogue before Lee wrote the finished dialogue. There are many of these pages. Even more pages of original art bear Kirby’s margin notes as well as the finished dialogue added by the letterer.
Wells muddies the waters trying to explain that neither of these things mean a thing because “we don’t know the context.” He describes the “synopsis” as “detailed instructions” from Lee to Kirby, and the margin notes as “general instructions” from Kirby to Lee, when clearly there is far more detail in the margin notes. In his assertion that this is the only documentary evidence, Wells ignores the thousands of pages of original art and more importantly, the published comics.
Lee has certainly been clearer about why the Marvel innovations came about when they did and what made Marvel different from other comics being published at that time, which would lead one to believe that the ideas he is so enthusiastically expressive about were originally his. Lee wrote in Origins of Marvel Comics that his publisher asked him to create a superhero team because of the success of a competitor’s comic book.
Lee “has certainly been clearer” in Origins, his manufactured history. It contains first drafts of a number of mythological stories designed to erase Marvel’s real creators and writers.
Unfortunately, for the purposes of this essay, for most of Kirby’s career he has worked in partnership with Joe Simon, or under the editorship of Stan Lee, so it has never been easy to tell definitively how much he contributed to the work in relation to his colleagues… I don’t know how much of the content of Kirby’s pre-Marvel work to attribute to him and how much to his collaborator Joe Simon and Dave Wood.
As with the primary evidence in the Marvel case, the stories from these collaborations present themselves for our scrutiny. One widely-held S&K belief has already been dispatched as it turns out that Kirby inked nearly all of of his own work after his return from the war. In the face of attempts to obfuscate by the TwoMorrows Kirby Checklist, Martin O’Hearn has determined through his own analysis that Kirby was the writer of a number of stories he pencilled and inked (every one analyzed), as well as the first Challengers story (at least partially inked by Kirby). Perhaps the best way to approach the question is to start with Kirby’s claim that he always wrote his own stories, and subtract those for which better evidence than Joe Simon’s say-so comes to light.
There are certainly many other sources for [Kirby’s] dark vision of life being an eternal struggle against the controlling forces of anti-life — his childhood in New York City’s tough Hell’s kitchen neighborhood, his experience as an infantryman in WWII Europe, his career in the hard-nosed comic book business with companies other than Marvel. But his experiences at Marvel in the 1960s may very well have reinforced some long-held feelings.
Wells glosses over a key reason for Kirby’s disdain for “noble death.” His combat experience taught him there was no such thing. Lee’s wartime desk jockey experience taught him war was a time to drive downtown to chase girls.
George Raft was from Hell’s Kitchen, which is on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. James Cagney, John Garfield, and Jack Kirby were from the Lower East Side.
The TCJ Library edit
Wells added a number of clarifying passages to the newer version. He also took the opportunity to parenthetically respond to R.C. Harvey’s Kirby Collector rebuttal:
(Some attribute the change to artistic growth on the part of Kirby. I don’t see the New Gods as an organic artistic development from the Marvel stories; to me, the two bodies of work represent opposite points of view on the same subject matter rather than stages of development.)
accordingtokirby 