GROTH: How did you feel during the ’60s when Stan became a personality in the books and sort of became the official spokesman and figurehead for Marvel Comics?
KIRBY: Well, Stan became a personality through his relationship with the owner.
ROZ KIRBY: Can I say something? It bothered me a lot when it said Stan Lee this and Stan Lee that. If they wanted to be fair, they could have said, “Produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” But he didn’t have to say, “Written by —.” He didn’t have to take the entire credit. He’d put down drawn by Jack “King” Kirby and all that stuff.
KIRBY: Yes, and he’d be very flippant.
ROZ KIRBY: Jack took it with a grain of salt, but I was the one who was very hurt by it all.
GROTH: I see. Did you ever talk to Stan about the application of credit?
KIRBY: You can’t talk to Stan about anything.
ROZ KIRBY: Every so often he’d put down, “Produced by —”
KIRBY: Yeah, sometimes he did. Stan was a very rigid type. At least, he is to me. That’s how I sized him up. He’s a very rigid type, and he gets what he wants when the advantage is his. He’s the kind of a guy who will play the advantages. When the advantage isn’t his at all, he’ll lose. He’ll lose with any creative guy. And I could never see Stan Lee as being creative. The only thing he ever knew was he’d say this word “Excelsior!”
GROTH: Well, what I wanted to ask you was, what did you think of Stan creating this public personality where everything was stamped with “Stan Lee Presents”? He manufactured himself as a kind of grand figure.
ROZ KIRBY: That’s what he wants.
KIRBY: I think Stan has a God complex. Right now, he’s the father of the Marvel Universe. He’s a guy with a God complex.
GROTH: Did you sort of see it coming in the ’60s when Stan was putting his name all over the place? Did you see this kind of— ?
KIRBY: Well, you don’t have to see a thing like that coming. It was happening, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Stan Lee was the editor, and Stan had a lot of influence at Marvel, and there was nothing you could do about it. Who are you going to talk to about it, see?
GROTH: Was Stan your basic contact with Marvel? He was the one that you — ?
KIRBY: Yes. I’d come in, and I’d give Stan the work, and I’d go home, and I wrote the story at home. I drew the story at home. I even lettered in the words in the balloons in pencil.
ROZ KIRBY: Well, you’d put them in the margins.
KIRBY: Sometimes I put them in the margins. Sometimes I put ’em in the balloons, but I wrote the entire story. I balanced the story…
GROTH: How long were your discussions with Stan Lee when you were discussing the next Thor or the next Avengers or the next Fantastic Four? How long would you talk to Stan about it?
KIRBY: Not much. I didn’t particularly care to talk to Stan, and I just gave him possibly some idea of what the next story would be like, and then I went home. I told him very little, and I went home, and I conceived and put down the entire story on paper.
GROTH: How do you feel when he talks about what a great guy you are, what a terrific co-worker you were, which he does frequently when asked about the good ol’ days?
KIRBY: Why wouldn’t he say that?
ROZ KIRBY: Yeah. Look what Jack did for Marvel.
KIRBY: Why wouldn’t he say that? If I hadn’t saved Marvel and if I hadn’t come up with those features, he would have nothing to work on. He wouldn’t be working right now. I don’t know what he’d be doing now. He wouldn’t be in any editorial position.
GROTH: Do you think he believes that, or is that a public relations facade?
KIRBY: What’s that?
GROTH: Oh, that he thinks you’re a great guy, and he loved working with you.
KIRBY: I say it’s a facade, and what he really means is he loved taking me. I just hope that you don’t find yourselves in a position where you have to deal with that kind of a personality.
ROZ KIRBY: I’d like to say something if I could. Jack created many characters before he even met Stan. He created almost all the characters when he was associated with Stan, and after he left Stan, he created many, many more characters. What has Stan created before he met Jack, and what has he created after Jack left?
KIRBY: And my wife was present when I created these damn characters. The only reason I would have any bad feelings against Stan is because my own wife had to suffer through that with me. It takes a guy like Stan, without feeling, to realize a thing like that. If he hurts a guy, he also hurts his family. His wife is going ask questions. His children are going to ask questions.
GROTH: Were you very — active isn’t the right word — but you were on top of things during that period? Did you know what was going on?
ROZ KIRBY: Of course. Jack was right down there working in what we called the dungeon. We had the basement then, a studio down there in the dungeon. Whenever anybody called, or Jack came to the office, I was usually there. It hurts to this day when my grandson sees Stan Lee’s name and he knows what his grandfather did, and he asks, “Why is Stan Lee’s name all over?” That’s hard to explain, you know.
KIRBY: Yeah. So why shouldn’t I be hurt? Why shouldn’t my family be hurt? I know my wife is sore at me—
ROZ KIRBY: No, I’m not sore.
KIRBY: —because I say these things, but I’m deeply hurt because it hurt my family. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not going to be believed at Marvel. I’m no going to be believed anywhere else unless… Actually, my own fears probably prodded me into an act of cowardice. It’s an act of cowardice. I should have told Stan to go to hell and found some other way to make a living, but I couldn’t do it. I had my family. I had an apartment. I just couldn’t give all that up.
GROTH: Because you didn’t have alternatives?
KIRBY: I didn’t have alternatives, and DC wasn’t that big an alternative. In fact, I began to do as much work at DC as I could.
GROTH: At the risk of sounding partisan, let me ask you this: every time I read something by Stan or see Stan speak publicly, I’m struck by how obvious a bullshit artist he is. Was he always that way?
ROZ KIRBY: Yeah.
KIRBY: Yes. Yes, I knew Stan when he was a young boy.
ROZ KIRBY: He was Mr. Personality. That’s what he was.
KIRBY: If you ever get to talk with Joe Simon, Simon will tell you exactly what the hell Stan Lee was. He was just a little wise guy, and he came from a family that was upper-middle class, and he could do whatever he liked. He could say whatever he liked. I’ll be frank with you. We considered him a pain in the ass. He grew up to be exactly what we considered him. The only thing that ever bothered me about this thing was not the fact that I couldn’t make a living, because I did. I finally found a way to make a living. In fact, I went to California. I was the first artist in New York—
ROZ KIRBY: No, that comes later. He didn’t ask you about that.
KIRBY: I’m the first artist in New York — wait a minute! — I’m the first artist in New York to go to California, and I went to California because I just about had it with the field. I had it with the field. I had to feel like a man again.
GROTH: What year did you come out here?
KIRBY: Let’s see. I believe that was in ’67. In fact, Carmine Infantino was then editor of DC, and then Mort Weisinger came to visit us. It was wonderful to see somebody from the East.
GROTH: Actually, there was at least one other character I wanted to talk about, which was Thor. Your run on Thor was also an incredibly imaginative period, which lasted quite a few issues.
KIRBY: Yes. I loved Thor because I loved legends. I’ve always loved legends. Stan Lee was the type of guy who would never know about Balder and who would never know about the rest of the characters. I had to build up that legend of Thor in the comics.
"On the Trail of Tomorrow Man!" in Journey Into Mystery #86 (November 1962 ) plot by Lee, script by Larry Lieber; Kirby inked by Dick Ayers ©Marvel Comics, Inc.
GROTH: The whole Asgardian…
KIRBY: Yes. The whole Asgardian company, see? I built up Loki. I simply read Loki was the classic villain and, of course, all the rest of them. I even threw in the Three Musketeers. I drew them from Shakespearean figures. I combined Shakespearean figures with the Three Musketeers and came up with these three friends who supplemented Thor and his company, and this is the way I kept these strips going by creative little steps like that.
GROTH: Some of the Asgardian landscapes, it seems like you must have taken great joy in…
KIRBY: I did. I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I’ve been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I can tell you that I’m very well-versed in science fact and science fiction. I’m 71 years old, and so I’ve seen all this new conception. I used to read the first science fiction books, and I began to learn about the universe myself and take it seriously. I know the names of the stars. I know how near or far the heavenly bodies are from our own planet. I know our own place in the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome. I found it in Thor. I found it in Galactus.
GROTH: Let me ask you something that’s been on my mind for many years, and that is, I thought Vince Colletta did not do your pencils justice.
KIRBY: Yes.
GROTH: In fact, he was one of the weakest inkers on your work, and he inked a lot of the Thor books. How did you feel about his work?
ROZ KIRBY: Didn’t you like Sinnott the best?
KIRBY: I liked Sinnott the best. I like Mike Royer. Colletta was a good professional inker, but I didn’t care too much for his particular style.
GROTH: He seemed to mitigate the power of the drawing.
KIRBY: Well, there was nothing I could do about these things at any rate. It was the company that hired these guys, and it was the company that gave them the assignments, and my part in asking for an inker or suggesting an inker was nil. I never made the choice.
ROZ KIRBY: Some of the inkers would actually erase pencil lines.
KIRBY: Yeah. They’d erase my pencil lines. And so I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make those choices. My main concern was just making a living. I wasn’t going to get temperamental and fight about inkers or anything else. In short, I did what I had to do to supplement my family.
GROTH: Jack said you guys moved out here in ’67.
ROZ KIRBY: Uh… ’68.
GROTH: ’68? So you were still working for Marvel when you moved to California.
KIRBY: Yes.
GROTH: And I believe you left Marvel in around ’70 or ’71, if I remember correctly. You left Marvel somewhere around Fantastic Four #102. You just did a couple of issues past the 100 mark.
ROZ KIRBY: Yeah. That’s right.
GROTH: Now, can you explain the circumstances of why you left Marvel, and why you left at that particular time?
KIRBY: There comes a time when you’ve had a gut-full of everything. I had a gut-full of Marvel, a gut-full of New York.
ROZ KIRBY: And Carmine Infantino came out…
KIRBY: And again, Carmine Infantino also had kind of a gut-full. He was an artist who I thought was out of place either as a publisher or as an editor or anything that merited a higher position.
ROZ KIRBY: He gave Jack the opportunity to do his own work.
GROTH: He came out here and courted you?
KIRBY: Yes. He came out here, and he was very kind to me.
ROZ KIRBY: He came to the house on Passover, and I gave him a matzo-ball soup, and he hated it. [Laughter.]
KIRBY: I guess matzo-ball soup doesn’t agree with everybody.
GROTH: Had you known Infantino prior to his contact with you?
KIRBY: Yes, I did. Infantino was an artist, and he was always a very good artist, and then he became the editor and publisher of DC.
GROTH: Now when you say you had difficulty with Marvel, can you clarify what you mean by that?
KIRBY: I’ll clarify it by saying I’m basically a man. I’m basically a guy from the East Side. I’m basically a guy who likes to be a man, and if you try to deprive me of it, I can’t live with it. That’s what the industry was doing to me, and I had a gut-fall of that. I couldn’t do anything less. I had to get myself as far away.… Well, although Carmine was nice to me, I wasn’t having a great time with him. He was an artist who didn’t know how to be an editor or a publisher. It was his first joust with that kind of—
ROZ KIRBY: But, he gave you the opportunity to do your own work.
KIRBY: Yes, he gave me the opportunity to do The New Gods, and The New Gods was actually a blessing to me because I got off on another course, and The New Gods made sales for DC.
ROZ KIRBY: He had complete control over the writing. He picked his own inker. He could do anything he wanted.
KIRBY: Yeah. Nobody bothered me out here, and I did The New Gods as I saw ’em. I did The New Gods as I felt they should be done.
GROTH: Was it a tough decision to go from Marvel to DC?
ROZ KIRBY: No, because he made more money. They offered him more money.
KIRBY: DC was actually like a haven because I was an individual there. I was able to do something under my own name. In other words, if I wrote, “Jack Kirby” wrote it. If I drew, “Jack Kirby” drew it. And the truth was there, and I began to write and draw, and I felt at last a sense of freedom, and with the sales rising from those books, my freedom became more apparent to me, and I felt a hell of a lot better.
GROTH:When Infantino came out and talked to you, did he offer you all this, or did you actually negotiate for it? Did you tell him you wanted more control over the work?
ROZ KIRBY: He just said we’d like you to work, and Jack said, “Well, I’ll give you three books.”
GROTH: But it was Jack who basically made the suggestion that he do the books, that he have control over them, and so forth.
KIRBY: Yes. That’s what I wanted, and I told Carmine, and he gave them to me. And the books I did for DC were—
ROZ KIRBY: They offered him Superman, but he said he wouldn’t take Superman.
KIRBY: No, I wouldn’t take Superman.
ROZ KIRBY: But he says, “What’s the worst selling book?” and he says, “Jimmy Olsen.” He says, “Give me Jimmy Olsen, and I’ll see what I can do with it.”
KIRBY: I took Jimmy Olsen because it was a dog. It didn’t have the sales of Superman, and I felt the best way I could prove myself was taking a book that was slow and speeding up it’s sales. That’s the way to prove yourself. And so I took Jimmy Olsen, and Jimmy Olsen became part of the series of books that I did for DC, and they all made money. Jimmy Olsen was making money. DC couldn’t believe it. [Laughter.]
"A Superman in Supertown" in Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #147 (March 1972) was inked and lettered by Mike Royer ©1972 DC Comics
GROTH: How was your relationship with DC during that whole period?
KIRBY: Oh, it was… I had some trouble with them, too.
ROZ KIRBY: Not at the beginning. They let you alone, and they didn’t bother you. When you started doing The New Gods they didn’t bother you.
KIRBY: No, they didn’t bother me when I was doing The New Gods, but there was temperament to contend with, and they had all new editorial people. There was a lot of different temperament to contend with.
ROZ KIRBY: They changed his Superman’s head.
KIRBY: Well, they…
GROTH: They had Curt Swan re-draw all of your Superman heads, didn’t they?
ROZ KIRBY: Now everybody does Superman a different way.
KIRBY: They cut the heads off my Superman, and then they replaced them with a standard Superman head.
GROTH: Did that bother you?
KIRBY: Yes, it bothered me, of course, because a man is entitled to draw things in his own style. I didn’t hurt Superman. I made him powerful. I admire Superman, but I’ve got to do my own style. That’s how I would see it, and I had a right to do that, and nobody had the right to tamper with your work and shape it differently. What if he gave it to an amateur? Think of what an amateur might do to your work. What if this guy thought this amateur had great possibilities, and he wanted to see what he could do with that story? And he picked your story? And you knew damn well what would happen.
GROTH: Luckily, they would never do such a thing. [Silence.] A little joke.
KIRBY:[Chuckling.] Yes. Let me say that all editorial decisions coming down from administration weren’t always wise.
GROTH:[Laughter.] That’s putting it kindly.
KIRBY: Let me put it that way.
Pingback: When comics history attacks: Read Gary Groth’s controversial Jack Kirby interview | Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources – Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment
I would love love love if you made a one page version of this so I could put it on Instapaper and read it on my Kindle…
Agreed!!!
Why don’t you just cut and past the text into a word documant then make a PDF?
try http://www.readability.com
Agreed!!!
Today, across the street from 480 Lexington Avenue, where DC’s offices used to be, and Jack Kirby went to be drafted into the Army, you’ll find Midtown Comics.
Really glad you posted this. A great read. THX!
When you republished this interview in book form, you included an editorial note mentioning that some of Jack’s claims… um… weren’t exactly true. It might have been nice to have included the note here, given the inflamatory nature of the interview.
That’s not accurate. Gary Groth published a note saying that some of the claims were possibly exaggerated (Groth never said they were not true), a thought I echoed upon publishing this on Monday.
POSSIBLY exaggerated? And your “thought” was echoed where? Most folks on the net seem to be linking directly to this page. Your “thought” seems the equivalent of printing a newspaper correction in the back of the classifieds.
A question for Goodman: do you go around demanding a correction everytime Stan Lee claims that he was the mastermind behind Marvel comics while Kirby and Ditko were talented artists hired to carry out the Lee vision? Because Lee often makes claims of this sort, and rarely gets challenged on it or corrected.
If you can link to an actual interview where Lee pisses all over his co-creators the way Kirby does here, explicitly denying their contribution the way Kirby does here, I’ll be happy to suggest an editorial note be appended to it correcting the record. Kirby says “Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. … It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things for that matter. … Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK?” This doesn’t exactly jive with the recollection of anybody else who worked there (including earlier Kirby interviews). Kirby actually says Lee did “nothing” to warrant his name being on the stories. Good luck finding an interview where Lee says his contributors did “nothing” to warrant their name being in the credits, but if you find one I’d warrant Groth would definitely insist that an editorial note regarding the falsity of the statement was warranted (and he’d be correct).
Yeah, I don’t believe some of this. That bit about Stan Lee didn’t even do the dialogue… that’s pretty shaky. Lee’s weird nerdy/hipster dialogue is pretty distinctive, and the style was the same in the stuff he did with Ditko (and Ditko has never claimed that Lee didn’t write the dialogue).
Also, I doubt very much that Kirby designed Spider-Man. Put Spider-Man next to a bunch of Ditko superheroes and a bunch of Kirby superheroes and it’ll be obvious. Ditko was the one who didn’t like capes, and would give characters whole-head masks whenever possible. It’s hard to recognize now because we’re all so used to him, but Spider-Man’s costume is really weird. Nobody but Ditko would have designed something like that when told “do a spider-themed superhero”. Black web designs on red, with arbitrary solid blue patches on the sides, blank white eyes, and webbing under the arms?
What is apparent to me every time I see comments on the interview is that many people comment on it without having read it.
What is really going on in the interview is Kirby is ripping Lee to bits, making clear he has no respect for Lee as a writer or as a man.
The interview is a conversation, in conversation there is almost always use of hyperbole, comments which are exaggerated for humor (even if it’s an insulting humor), and comments which might be understood by the participants but might not be understood by the reader.
Since Kirby commented in the interview as well as other interviews that Stan dialogued the stories in the printed comics it ought to be apparent that in saying Stan had someone in the office fill in the balloons Kirby was simply heaping scorn on Lee. As to Kirby’s claims that he wrote the dialogue, isn’t it clear Kirby is describing the dialogue he wrote on the pages as a guide for Lee?
Kirby says he created Spiderman, well he did create a character called Spiderman who is a teenage orphan with spider powers. Kirby said he also created the costume. Again he did create a Spiderman costume, and could very easily have remembered creating the costume used in the published comic book.
Why is Kirby so angry with Lee? Maybe it’s because Lee took the whole writers page rate when Kirby was creating the characters and plots. Meanwhile Kirby was being paid about half what artists at DC were being paid for penciled art.
This issue has become a major topic in the current lawsuit. Lee and Marvel now contend Kirby didn’t create any of the characters, and that Kirby wasn’t involved in the plots. The reason for this revisionist history on the part of Lee is obvious. If Kirby wasn’t paid for writing how could his writing possibly be work-made-for-hire?
Dick Ayers (Alter-Ego Magazine): “Stan said, ‘I can’t think of a story for Sgt. Fury. We won’t have an issue unless you think of something.”
when Ayers requested a plot credit Stan told him, “Since when did you develop an ego? Get out of here!”
Ayers wrote a wordless story (And not a Word was Spoken) for Two-Gun Kid #61.
Ayers submitted a payment requisition to Stan for the plot feeling he should be paid more for writing the wordless story. Stan and Ayers argued, and Stan agreed to pay Ayers for five pages of lettering.
Stan Goldberg interview with Jim Amash from Alter-Ego Magazine edited by Roy Thomas.
GOLDBERG: “Jack would sit there at lunch, and tell us these great ideas about what he was going to do next. It was like the ideas were bursting from every pore of his body. It was very interesting because he was a fountain of ideas. One day Jack came in and had this 20-page story and proceded to tell us he was having his house and studio painted. I asked, “Where did you draw the story?” Jack said,”I put my board on the stair banister, and drew it.”
GOLDBERG:” Stan would drive me home and we’d plot our stories in the car. I’d say to Stan,”How’s this? Millie loses her job.” He’d say,”Great! Give me 25 pages.” And that took him off the hook. One time I was in Stan’s office and I told him, “I don’t have another plot.” Stan got out of his chair and walked over to me, looked me in the face, and said very seriously, “I don’t ever want to hear you say you can’t think of another plot.” Then he walked back and sat doen in his chair. He didn’t think he needed to tell me anything more.”
JIM AMISH:” Sounds like you were doing most of the writing then.”
GOLDBERG: “Well, I was.”One time I was in Stan’s office and I told him, “I don’t have another plot.” Stan got out of his chair and walked over to me, looked me in the face, and said very seriously, “I don’t ever want to hear you say you can’t think of another plot.” Then he walked back and sat doen in his chair. He didn’t think he needed to tell me anything more.”
JIM AMISH:” Sounds like you were doing most of the writing then.”
GOLDBERG: “Well, I was.”
Steve Ditko’s letter to Comic Book Marketplace magazine published in issue #63. :
In your Comic Book Marketplace #61, July 1998. page 45, Stan Lee talks about “…a very famous scene…” of a trapped Spider-Man lifting heavy machinery over his head. The drama of that sequence was first commented on and popularized by Gil Kane. Stan says “I just mentioned the idea…I hadn’t thought of devoting that many pages to it…” I was publicly credited as the plotter only starting with issue #26. The lifting sequence is in issue #33. The fact is we had no story or idea discussion about Spider-Man books even before issue #26 up to when I left the book. Stan never knew what was in my plotted stories until I took in the penciled story, the cover, my script and Sol Brodsky took the material from me and took it all into Stan’s office, so I had to leave without seeing or talking to Stan.
Steve Ditko, New York
Wally Wood:
WHAT MAKES STANLEY RUN?
Once upon a time, many years ago a young man, born the son of a
famous comic book publisher, decided to become rich and famous. He
had no idea of how to go about this at first, lacking both the
brains and talent to achieve this goal. But he was driven by one
emotion, rather TWO .. ENVY and HATE. Envy for the people
who were responsible for his enviable state, and hatred for the people
who could DRAW. Comics are, after all, an artist’s medium. I’ve
never read a story in comics that I’d bother with if it were written
in novel form.
Did I say Stanley had no smarts? Well, he DID come up with two sure
fire ideas… the first one was “Why not let the artists WRITE the
stories as well as draw them?”… And the second was … ALWAYS SIGN
YOUR NAME ON TOP …BIG”. And the rest is history … Stanley, of course
became rich and famous … over the bodies of people like Bill and Jack.
Bill, who had created nthe character that had made his father rich
wound up COLORING and doing odd jobs.
And Jack? Well, a friend of mine summed it up like this .. “Stanley
and Jack have a conference, then Jack goes home, and after a couple of
month’s gestation, a new book is born. Stanley gets all the money and
all the credit… And all poor old Jack gets is a sore ass hole.”
Wally Wood letter to John Hitchcock:
Wally Wood:
Dear John;
I read your comments on Ditko with interest. Knowing Steve, and his philosophy, well, I can’t help but agree with your conclusion. The Question was definitely giving Steve’s position on the issue of credit . . and other things. I envy him, and I can’t agree with him . . 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…
Stan Lee (Origins of Marvel Comics):
“Myself when born was christened Stanley Martin Lieber— truly an appellation
to conjure with. It had rhythm, a vitality, a lyricism all it’s own. I still remember one of my earliest purchases being a little rubber
stamp with my name on it, which I promptly stamped on every book and
paper I owned— and even on some I didn’t.”
Yes, Stan Goldberg did plot Millie the Model. Here he describes returning to Marvel in the early 60s:
“I started doing teenage books and the first book was called Kathy the Teenage Tornado. I took over the Millie the Model books, the Patsy books, but at the same time STAN WAS WRITING FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN AND ALL THOSE BOOKS. I was doing the initial colouring on all those books; I was creating the colour schemes on all those characters. Jack Kirby was turning so much out, along with Steve Ditko and there were so many good guys. They were doing it just to get a pay check and little did we know what was happening out there. Slowly and slowly Stan was getting some information, fan mail was coming in and then it just took off. So all through the ‘60s I did the teenage books, all the key books of all the first group of superheroes and villains that came out. That was my stint up there and it was all done on a freelance basis. Stan had no staff at that time. I would come in everyday and I was practically his staff, I’d do a lot of production with him. We had a grand time and we both had a nice relationship with each other. It was basically just he and I and then things started getting busier and busier and before you knew it Stan said to me, ‘Would you believe what’s happening?’ and for the next fifty years every time we email or talk to each other we say, ‘Could you believe what was happening?’ And before you know it fifty years have gone by.”
An interview with John Romita Sr:
CBA: Did you see Jack when he came into the office? Did you talk to him?
John: Oh, yes. We used to go out to lunch at the Playboy Club; sometimes four or five of us. We used to have wonderful conversations; I treasure them. You may have heard I used to drive home with them; whenever he was in for a story conference, Stan would drive Jack home. My house was on the way, so they’d drive me home, and then take Jack home. Sitting in the back seat of Stan’s convertible with the top down, going up Queens Boulevard, listening to them plot stories, I felt like I was sitting behind Cecil B. DeMille’s director’s chair. It was the most wonderful thing; I felt like a kid back there.
CBA: In the past, you’ve told that great anecdote about realizing they weren’t listening to the other!
John: I knew that even when I heard them plotting in other instances! [laughter] Jack would say, “Stanley, I think I’ve got an idea. How ’bout this?” Stan would say, “That’s not bad, Jack, but I’d rather see it this way.” Jack would absolutely forget what Stan said, and Stan would forget what Jack said. [laughter] I would bet my house that Jack never read the books after Stan wrote them; that’s why he could claim with a straight face that Stan never wrote anything except what Jack put in the notes. He was kidding himself; he never read them.
CBA: Did you see any of the problems Jack was having?
John: I had heard all of the inside stuff, like from the Herald-Tribune article that insulted Jack, that he thought Stan was a part of. Stan could not convince him of that, and certainly could not convince Roz that Stan hadn’t encouraged the writer to make fun of Jack. I know for a fact that Stan would rather bite his tongue than say such a thing, because Jack’s success would’ve been his success. There’s no reason to run Jack down. Stan had the position; he didn’t have to fight Jack for it. I don’t think Jack ever wanted the editorial position; if he wanted credit, he deserved credit. Stan used to give him credit all the time; he used to say most of these ideas are more than half Jack’s. Why they would think Stan would try to make him look bad in print is beyond me; but from that time on—which is very close to when I started there in the middle ’60s—when the Herald-Tribune article came out, there were very strained relations, and I thought it was a matter of time before Jack would leave; but I thought he would never leave, because I always figured if I had a success like Fantastic Four and Thor and Captain America, I don’t think I could leave; so I always assumed he’d stay grumbling, but Carmine made a deal Jack couldn’t refuse.
CBA: Stan is a well-loved guy, and he takes a lot of heat, but he’s also a showman and he has that hyperbole.
John: Oh, he’s a con man, but he did deliver. Anyone who says he didn’t earn what he’s got is not reading the facts. Believe me, he earned everything he gets. That’s why I never begrudged him getting any of the credit, and as far as I’m concerned, he can have his name above any of my stuff, anytime he wants. Every time I took a story in to Stan—and if Jack were reading it, he’d have felt the same way—I had only partial faith in my picture story. I worked it out and I believed in the characters, but I was only half-sure it was going to work. I always had my misgivings. By the time Stan would write it, I’d start to look at that story and say, “Son of a gun, it’s almost as though I planned it,” and I’d believe a hundredfold more in that story after he wrote it than before—and if Jack would’ve allowed himself to, he would’ve had the same satisfaction. I sincerely believe that.
I think Stan deserves everything he gets. Everyone complains, including me sometimes. I used to say, “I do the work, and Stan cashes the checks.” [laughter] It was only a half joke, but it’s the kind of a grumble you do when you’re tired.
Um, I think there is a difference between the work Stan Goldberg did plotting and drawing Millie the Model, however admirable it might have been, and Kirby’s essential role in conceptualizing, designing, drawing, and plotting the adventures of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the Silver Surfer, the Avengers, etc. etc. Kirby built the foundations of the Marvel Universe, for whatever that’s worth, and for many years his essential role was downplayed and belittled by Lee and by many journalists who glibly echoed Lee’s version of events. That belittling of Kirby’s imporance is the background for this interview.
The thing that is so telling about the Stan Goldberg story is Lee’s intimidation, as well as the fact that Millie the Model is exactly the sort of thing Stan Lee was known for writing until the 60′s. We have Stan silently getting up out of his chair, walking across the room, staring Goldberg in the eye, and ominously telling him, “I don’t want to ever hear you say you don’t have a plot again.” If Stan was leaning on Goldberg for plots on the type of material Lee was best at, what are the odds he had anything to contribute to Kirby, a man who was a life long reader of science fiction.? In fact all Stan did was apply shallow Archie comics style dialogue and cardstock characterizations to super heroes. Stan’s characters had no depth; his dialogue was nothing more than overwritten “elephant joke book” hackwork.
Kirby had a prototype of the FF dynamic as far back as the 1940′s with the Newsboy Legion: Big Words (Reed), Scrapper (Ben), and Gabby (Johnny).
The characters and dialogue Kirby created for the Fourth World are so far beyond the teenage Archie, Veronica, and Betty tropes in the 60′s books Lee dialogued that they can’t even be fairly compared.
BTW Jeet it’s actually gotten far worse. In Lee’s deposition from the current lawsuit Lee’s says even the crumbs of credit he brushed off the table were done to appease Kirby. Lee now says Kirby was barely involved at all in plotting the stories, and had no role in creating the core Marvel characters. Lee was directly confronted with prior statements from interviews, and the “Origins” books, and Lee now says:
“So I tried to write these — knowing Jack would read them, I tried to write them to make it look as if he and I were just doing everything together, to make him feel good. And we were doing it together.
But with something like Galactus, it was me who said, “I want to do a demigod. I want to call him Galactus.”
Jack said it was a great idea, and he drew a wonderful one and he did a great job on it. But in writing the book, I wanted to make it look as if we did it together. So I said we were both thinking about it, and we came up with Galactus.”
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What a load then, and what a load now. I have no doubt Jack Kirby is comics most influential artist; I know he plotted the stories, spun the ideas, and even wrote some of the dialogue, but overall, he could not write worth a crap. His run at DC, and later on, Marvel, in the seventies is full of great concepts and characters, that could not say a decent word of dialogue if his life depended on it. And have we forgot how different his art looks without Joe Sinott or even Vince Colletta inking his stuff? Read any book of his seventies Captain America run and you will see the ugly truth.
The truth is : Jack Kirby is a great artist, who made Marvel what it was, but he got screwed, just like everyone did, and the boss’ nephew, Stan Lee, got his name on every book for a long time after…..
We still don’t know how much Stan Lee wrote, edited, changed, or took credit for. And we never will.
Well, this is all a matter of opinion but I myself generally prefer the comics Kirby wrote in the 1970s (particularly the Fourth World stories) to the 1960s ones with Stan Lee’s dialogue. But reasonable people can disagree with that.What can’t be disputed is that Kirby had many decades of creativity before and after the 1960s (i.e. co-creating Catain America, solidifying genres like romance comics, and the slew of ideas in the 1970s that still inspire spin-offs). The exact extent and nature of the Lee/Kirby collaboration can be disputed endlessly but there have been educated attempts to sort it out (notably a long-running series on the topic in The Kirby Collector). The general upshot of all this is that Kirby’s contributions to both Marvel comics and comics at large is immense, and still underappreciated. Which, along with the inequitable economic rewards for his labors, explains the anger Kirby expressed in this interview and elsewhere.
I’m with Jeet as are many other people. Not only do I think Kirby was a better writer than Lee. It’s my opinion Lee is one of the absolute worst writers I’ve ever read in my life.
Kirby is without doubt one of the best writers ever to have worked in mainstream comics, and by far the best writer ever to have worked in the super hero genre, which isn’t a good way of expressing just how great a writer Kirby was, because super hero comics are the bottom of the barrel in terms of comic book writing. Kirby was a very rare exception who transcended the medium. His dialogue was one of his greatest attributes.
Lee’s dialogue is quit frankly overripe tripe.
I often wonder if the people who say they like Lee’s writing have read anything by him since they were 12. Go read something by him right now. It’s marshmallow fluff of the worst possible kind.
>[Kirby's] dialogue was one of his greatest attributes.
>Lee’s dialogue is quit frankly overripe tripe.
Well, it takes all kinds. Lee’s dialogue was in almost every Marvel comic of the 60s, when Marvel became such a huge success. Many of us thought that the freshness of it was what set Marvel apart from other superhero comics, such as those DC published (and it’s what took Marvel to number one). Those comics are still available in hardcover in masterworks and still enjoyed. (I’m currently rereading the Captain Americas Lee did with Gene Colan.)
Kirby’s dialogue was what got me to stop buying Captain America as a kid. I wasn’t the only one. The book took a big hit in sales when Kirby returned.
Goodman is operating under the assumption Lee had anything to do with what Kirby did at home, and then sold to Marvel.
Lee did rewrite Kirby’s stories, characters, and dialogue, which explains why silver age Marvel comics are unreadable junk.
A large measure of Kirby’s contempt for Lee can probably be put down to the fact that Lee was in effect stealing from Kirby by not paying Kirby for plotting.
After Ditko demanded payment and credit for plotting Spider-Man, Lee’s anger was so great he quit talking to Ditko.
In the early 60′s Kirby often wrote (and drew) 100 pages a month. Even if Kirby had been paid only a dollar a page for plotting, one hundred dollars a month in 1962 was a substantial sum of money.
People tend to dislike people who are stealing from them. Yes Kirby could have quit like Steve Ditko (never married, no children).
Stan Lee actually mentions Kirby’s writing experience/ability in a mid-Sixties letter page or column. It sounded rather favorable in tone. I think it was to alert readers to a comic Kirby scripted himself at that time without Lee. How sincere, we don’t know. The tone in the radio skit they did for MMMS suggested that they might’ve conversed over the phone and were on friendly terms in the early Sixties. But if Kirby was faking friendship with Lee prior to the newspaper article that made Kirby look foolish, which triggered their falling out, and Kirby really in fact hated Lee continuously, from the very first day he met a teenaged ‘rat fink’ Lee playing the flute, despising him as he did later in old age–we don’t hear this in the voice on the record. So what happened to destroy a great collaboration? Kirby’s character as man is called into question by Kirby’s contradictory relationships with Lee and Marvel if he hated Lee as this awful cheater and liar and yet was willing to work with him on one last Surfer comics and then they fall out again. Kirby would have to be a complete fool to trust Lee again with the Surfer book if this man, this monster, is in fact a true image of Lee. Yet he did, didn’t he. So there is more to this than a Lee bad, Kirby good, Hulk mentality.
In the record, Kirby is playing along, coning the fans as much as Lee does into thinking the Bullpen comradery is real. Maybe the feeling was real for Kirby, once. Kirby’s voice sounds unscripted. Others weren’t available for the record. Couldn’t Kirby have called in sick, too and not show up, if he hated Lee so much at that point, if Lee really never wrote anything then and stole complete credit, so Kirby here is not only a great cartoonist but a fine actor as well. He is as much a liar as Lee is, if you will. So we have here colleagues, collaborators eventually falling out over what: growing fame, money, perhaps jealousy by one or the other man or both, artistic rivalry. Kirby is older than Lee. Kirby didn’t like editors. One is the boss, the other the employee. There is a lot going on here psychologically that is too complex for simplistic thinking.
Throughout the early Sixties Lee continuously praises the artists and their contributions in and out of the letter pages. But Lee later begins to take more credit and we eventually end up with him being mistaken for a cartoonist by some reporters–a Walt Disney of comics–and he doesn’t quite let the cat out of the bag until he is pressured into doing so long after the harm has been done to his collaborators. At the time of Origin’s, maybe it was payback for Kirby mocking him in an issue of Mr. Miracle? Or Lee mistook his voice, persona as Marvel comics, as meaning sole creator?
But if we believe Kirby is the total victim we have to believe Kirby, a survivor and veteran of war, was so afraid of unemployment, risks, that he would do anything to keep his job. But Kirby’s actual behavior contradicts this and suggests something else besides fear is at work here. Kirby seems to be realizing and discovering or recognizing once more or more fully a profound interest in being an artist, that comics can be a deep form of self expression.
Kirby was in the business in its heyday when it probably was a lot meaner. He knew of Siegel and Shuster’s setbacks and losses; also he must’ve recalled his own lost case over Sky Masters; he never came to Simon’s defense during Simon’s attempt to regain copyright to Captain America; it seemed that copyrights and original art weren’t that important to him then; he must also have known about Bob Kane’s sweet heart deal with DC that kept his name on comics that Kane never even drew or wrote. Kirby ran a shop himself with Simon and must’ve had to calculate his share over what he would pay his colleagues. He was an employer once. He was once a boss himself of sorts with Simon’s help. Yes, Kirby admitted that an abiding fear, a result of childhood poverty, was behind his genius and output but was it fear that made him leave Marvel at that point. If you are afraid of losing work why not suffer the indignity some more and keep on working. It wasn’t fear. Pride and artistic ambition gave Kirby the courage to break free from Marvel and take the risk. It wasn’t security Kirby wanted then. It was freedom. Artistic freedom.
He left Marvel for a better deal with DC. And when things soured at DC, he was able to make a better deal to come back to Marvel. He bargained for creative freedom rather than licensing and or some other forms of compensation besides a paycheck. And when editors and others began to interfere at Marvel, he sought freedom elsewhere. It wasn’t even his original art at that point, just freedom to write and edit his own work. He wasn’t thinking it seems even about future movie deals, toys and such until he saw or realized his mistake when it was too late.
It seems to me then that if Kirby at this point in his career was really afraid of unemployment or causing harm to his family economically and socially, he would’ve kept his mouth shut at both places and just slaved away like many other artists, Gene Colan for example. Even at Marvel on his second go around, he could’ve kept quiet. It seemed Kirby got ambitious, he found his voice and wanted to express himself, so he risked getting creative freedom at both houses instead of trying to obtain a better contract on his creations or moving into story boarding sooner than later or some other commercial art field beside men in funny tights. He also loved those men in funny tights and conceptualizing.
>Throughout the early Sixties Lee continuously praises the artists and their contributions in and out of the letter pages. But Lee later begins to take more credit and we eventually end up with him being mistaken for a cartoonist by some reporters–a Walt Disney of comics–and he doesn’t quite let the cat out of the bag until he is pressured into doing so long after the harm has been done to his collaborators.
I wish folks could provide some actual examples of this. As you say, Lee frequently praised his collaborators in the sixties, and I thought he was pretty clear about their role in Origins of Marvel Comics in 1974. So where are the quotes of him taking all the credit? Is he really to be held responsible if a journalist mistakes him for a cartoonist?
This is Stan in 1968:
“Well, what we usually do is, with most of the artists, I usually get a rough plot. … Now this varies with the different artists. 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 make 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 good at plots. I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I. He just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing… I may tell him 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. ”
Now, Stan clearly considered the scripter of the book to be the “writer”. But he never seemed to shy away from the contribution the artists made to the plots- Kirby in particular. (By Fantastic Four 56 in 1966 they dropped the writer/artist credits, and gave Lee and Kirby a joint “produced by” credit, as they had done on occasion before that.)
Lee was called for two long depositions as part of the current lawsuit. A small percentage of those depositions were included in filings by Disney and Toberoff at the Justia Law site.
There is enough there to see that Lee is now saying Kirby’s contribution to the plots and character creation were minimal. Lee says at one point that during story conferences Kirby “didn’t always just sit there, sometimes he had something to say.”
Because Disney asked Lee’s depositions be placed under a Protective Order only small portions approved by Disney have been posted.
If the case goes to trial Lee’s full trial testimony will be public, and that will leave no doubt about what Stan’s version of events is.
Lee and Disney are clearly very concerned about the fact Kirby was not paid for writing plots, and character creation while at Marvel in the 60′s.
Lee has also gone so far as to make the absurd claim that he always paid for rejected pages in the 60′s. This statement was quickly disputed in sworn declarations by Joe Sinnott (who pointedly added he had no doubt the stories and characters were created by Kirby), Dick Ayers, Gene Colan, Jim Steranko, and Neal Adams.
Disney is resisting a declarations from Stan Goldberg saying his name wasn’t given to Disney in a timely matter.
Here, let me help you out. Here’s more from that deposition, where he hardly talks down Kirby’s contributions –
MR. TOBEROFF: Q. Please turn to Page 83, and go to the first column on Page 83, about halfway down the page – a little more than halfway down the page.
You’re quoted as saying, “You know, very often, in fact, most of the time after we got started, the artist did most of the plotting. I would just give him a one-liner, like, ‘Let’s feature Dr. Doom and he goes back in time’ or something. And whoever the artist was, he’d practically do the whole story. But when I would get the artwork back, and I had to put the copy in, very often there were things that I thought didn’t work or were foolish or didn’t make sense or something.
“Instead of having the artist redraw and go through a lot of trouble, the thing that was the most fun for me was to find out how I could take that discordant element in the story and make it seem as if we purposefully did that to embellish the story. You know what I mean? And turn it into a good story point. It was like doing a crossword puzzle.”
Do you have any reason to believe you didn’t say that?
STAN LEE: No. I’m proud of that. That was pretty clever.
Q. And does that accurately describe a successful Marvel method?
STAN LEE: Yes. With some artists. Some artists I had
…
Q. And turning over to the next page of the article, up on the actually the crossover page 37, there’s another document that’s recreated that says, Synopsis for Fantastic — Synopsis for Fantastic Four No. 8 “Prisoners of Puppetmaster.”
Do you recognize that as another of the synopses you created in connection with Fantastic Four?
STAN LEE: I hadn’t read that for so many years, but, yeah, that seems to be mine. I didn’t even know this was in here. Wow. Yeah. See, instead of telling him page by page, I would say, Devote five pages to this, five pages to that, and three pages to that. Yeah.
Q. That was typical of how you were working utilizing the Marvel method?
STAN LEE: Yeah. Sometimes I wouldn’t even be this specific. And I wouldn’t have cared if Jack devoted, let’s say, six pages to this and he changed that to three pages. Just so he got the idea what I had this mind. But he was good at making his own changes, and very often he’d improve them. But, yeah, this is mine.
Q. Let’s go to another character, The Silver Surfer.
STAN LEE: Oh, yeah.
Q. Could you tell us how the Silver Surfer came about?
STAN LEE: Right. I wanted to have a villain called Galactus. We had so many villains who were so powerful.
I was looking for somebody who would be more powerful than any. So I figured somebody who is a demigod who rides around in space and destroys planets.
I told Jack about it and told him how I wanted the story to go generally. And Jack went home, and he drew it. And he drew a wonderful version. But when I looked at the artwork, I saw there was some nutty looking naked guy on a flying surfboard.
And I said, “Who is this?”
And he said — well, I don’t remember whether he called him the surfer or not. He may have called him the surfer. But he said, “I thought that anybody as powerful as Galactus who could destroy planets should have somebody who goes ahead of him, a herald who finds the planets for him. And I thought it would be good to have that guy on a flying surfboard.”
I said, “That’s wonderful.” I loved it. And I decided to call him The Silver Surfer, which I thought sounded dramatic.
But that was all. He was supposed to be a herald to find Galactus his planets. But the way Jack drew him, he looked so noble and so interesting that I said, “Jack, you know, we ought to really use this guy. I like him.”
And I tried to write his copy so that he was very philosophical, and he was always commenting about the state of the world and: Don’t you human beings realize you live in a paradise. Why don’t you appreciate it? Why do you fight each other and hate each other? And I had him talking like that all the time. And the college kids started to love him. And whenever I would lecture at a college, and there was a question-and-answers period, it was inevitably the Silver Surfer that they would talk about the most. So I was very happy with him.
But that’s how it happened accidentally. I mean, I had nothing — I didn’t think of him. Jack — it was one of the characters Jack tossed into the strip. And he drew him so beautifully that I felt we have to make him an important character.
Wce, Some artists may have been happy being praised by Stan in the LOC. Sounds kind of pathetic to me, but if all they wanted was a pat on the head I guess that’s their business.
Kirby certainly resented Lee taking the full share of the writing page rate. As did Wally Wood.
Wally Wood’s letter to John Hitchcock.
Dear John;
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…
Stan Lee (Origins of Marvel Comics):
“Myself when born was christened Stanley Martin Lieber— truly an appellation
to conjure with. It had rhythm, a vitality, a lyricism all it’s own. I still remember one of my earliest purchases being a little rubber
stamp with my name on it, which I promptly stamped on every book and
paper I owned— and even on some I didn’t.”
Howard Chaykin said of Wood “he was just an engine of rage. I really can’t put it any more specifically than that.” He was incredibly talented… and an angry self-destructive alcoholic who ultimately shot himself. I don’t think you can blame Stan for that.
Sure, Wally Wood was a “self-destructive alcoholic” but he was hardly alone in his anger towards Stan Lee. As we’ve seen, Ditko and Kirby were also angry at Lee and for the same reason: that he took credit for work that they did. And other cartoonists — Gil Kane and Stan Goldberg — have echoed or corroborated these compaints. Or were Ditko, Kirby, Kane, Goldberg (and indeed virtually everyone who drew anything for Marvel in the 1960s) also “self-destructive alcoholics”. Its odd that so many “self-destructive alchoholics” would end up doing freelance for the same company.
Keep in mind Wood had enough intelligence to be completely unimpressed by Lee putting Wood’s name on the cover of Daredevil rather than crediting, and paying Wood for writing Daredevil.
It’s incomprehensible to me that you will hear people say, “Stan made the artists stars.”
That is not only a great insult to the artists (it’s a way of saying they would be forgotten without Lee’s cornball hype).
What kind of man would be impressed by a man who took money which rightly should have been their’s, but “repaid” them by making them a star.
Reminds me of a certain story in Little Orphan Annie where she was singing for a smooth talking “nice guy” manager who was robbing her blind, while making her a star.
And how great an insult is that? It isn’t even the creator’s ability which makes them a star, it’s the promoter.
Silver Star #2
Darius Drumm: Oh…Been watching me have you? Then you know that the flame of hate lies in free domain…And those nasty, crawly, snapping demons who brought poor Custer to his doom…were more than fanciful creations.
(Drumm produces a bizarre hand puppet which is an extension of his own hand. It speaks for Drumm as a ventriloquists dummy while Drumm rolls his eyes insanely):
“Let him create miracles—Who is born to the task.”
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8ie37mgxIXA/RvnVGPjl4tI/AAAAAAAABwY/Sa708W_j_ps/s400/Darius+Drumm+sez.jpg
Drumm: Well—! Can you imagine how I feel at this moment! You–You–Obsolete old fool. Using me as maudlin pap for your own regrettable act. Stupid old mechanic. Builder of classic lives that tear up the roads of the brain—like vehicles of pain.
Classic passions!
Classic irony!
Classic vengance! Eh, Dad…?
It was like Genesis—Like the Big Bang—First darkness everywhere, and then light and sight and wisdom—And that smug ruthless face of yours dad.
Ours was a classic vendetta from the beginning.
The subject of “battered wives” was rarely discussed at the time—And there I was—About to be born of one.
But that didn’t elate you, you backwoods big mouth. You were the Grand Moogah! The Dean of Discipline–The Prophet of the “Foundation For Self Denial.”
Naturally it set off your awesome rhetoric!
It was good enough to cover up mother’s so called “accidental bruises” and focus all attention on the emergence of a new life…!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8ie37mgxIXA/RvctiPjl4sI/AAAAAAAABwQ/K1NP0h_Px3M/s400/Ugly+Baby+Drumm.jpg
Massive popularity in one’s time is not always the barometer by which art must be judged.
The Marvel books were hugely popular, but it is my feeling that Jack made by far the most significant narrative contribution to the stories on the ones he did with Stan. I will conceed that Lee’s copywriting and blurbing had some impact on the product, but Jack provided not just the art but the entire articulation of the stories, short of the actual choices of words on the page. In looking at those books now, I prefer Jack’s actual choices of words in the New Gods material and in all the other comics he did in his return to Marvel and for Pacific later. Lee’s captions and balloon are to me now nearly unreadable, and it is hard to deny that whatever imagination and creativity Lee claimed to have disappeared at exactly the same time that his partnership with Jack ended.
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Stan Lee’s 2010 deposition.
STAN LEE: Yeah. Sometimes I wouldn’t even be this specific. And I wouldn’t have cared if Jack devoted, let’s say, six pages to this and he changed that to three pages. JUST SO HE GOT THE IDEA THAT I HAD IN MIND.
STEVE DITKO’S letter to Comic Book Marketplace magazine published in issue #63. :
In your Comic Book Marketplace #61, July 1998. page 45, Stan Lee talks about “…a very famous scene…” of a trapped Spider-Man lifting heavy machinery over his head. The drama of that sequence was first commented on and popularized by Gil Kane. Stan says “I just mentioned the idea…I hadn’t thought of devoting that many pages to it…” I was publicly credited as the plotter only starting with issue #26. The lifting sequence is in issue #33. The fact is we had no story or idea discussion about Spider-Man books even before issue #26 up to when I left the book. Stan never knew what was in my plotted stories until I took in the penciled story, the cover, my script and Sol Brodsky took the material from me and took it all into Stan’s office, so I had to leave without seeing or talking to Stan.
Steve Ditko, New York
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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 hasthe advantage since my father’s death in 1993 of being the last man standing.
He has been able to say, calim, 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. Neal Kirby
I have to agree. Knowing that Kirby loved mythology and science fiction books, I could see the Thor concept as a comic book coming from him. What gets me is how Lee would say in early interviews, “I got an artist to draw”( what ever character he was promoting)on video without mentioning Jack Kirby. This is especially true of some of the Marvel cartoons on VHS from 1966. They were what we now call motion comics. I remember them because I purchased them back in the mid 1980′s. I’d be thinking to myself, when is Jack Kirby’s name going to come up in those interviews?
By the way, Neal, do you draw?
Neal, do you or any of the sibling draw?
Stan Lee: “Myself when born was christened Stanley Martin Lieber— truly an appellation
to conjure with. It had rhythm, a vitality, a lyricism all it’s own. I still remember one of my
earliest purchases being a little rubber stamp with my name on it, which I promptly stamped on every book and paper I owned— and even on some I didn’t.”
Lee’s 2010 deposition
Stan Lee: I wanted to have a villain called Galactus.
I was looking for somebody who would be more powerful than any. So I figured somebody who is a demigod who rides around in space and destroys planets.
I told Jack about it and told him how I wanted the story to go generally. And Jack went home, and he drew it.
Lee, in The Origins Of Marvel Comics describes how he supposedly created Thor :
“The only one who could top the heroes we already had would be a Super-God, but I
didn’t think the world was quite ready for that concept yet.
So it was back to the ol’ drawing board. I must have gone through a dozen pencils and
a thousand sheets of paper in the days that followed, making notes and sketches, listing
names and titles, and jotting down every type of superpower I could think of.
But I kept coming back to the same ludicrous idea: the only way to top the others would be with a Super-God.
As far as I can remember, Norse mythology always turned me on.
Historians of the future will wish to note that Larry Lieber acquiesced when asked if he’d pen a new superhero strip for the greater glory of Marveldom. Let the record show that Jack Kirby did likewise when offered the illustrating chore.”
Kim Aamodt: I really sweated out plots, unlike Jack Kirby. Jack just ignited and came out with ideas, and Joe’d just kind of nod his head in agreement. Jack’s face looked so energized when he was plotting that it seemed as if sparks were flying off him.Joe was on the ground, and Jack was on cloud nine. Jack was more of the artist type; he had great instincts.
Walter Geier: Jack Kirby was great about that; he always came up with the plots. Jack had a fertile mind. Joe used to sit there when the writers came in for conferences. They sat there and made up the plots for the writers. Jack did most of that. Joe would say something once in a while, but Jack was the idea man. Joe didn’t talk much. He could come up with decent plots, but it was usually very sketchy stuff. A lot of times Joe would say, ” Awww…you figure out the ending.” Jack would give me the ending, because he was good at figuring out stories. It was not hard to work with Jack. They were Jack’s plots. I just supplied the dialogue.
John Romita: Jack got a chance to knock the stuff out, and use his own characters. Jack used to surprise Stan with new characters almost every time he turned in a story. Take Galactus who devours planets. Instead of knocking down buildings, Kirby is talking about eating planets.
I told him once he threw away more ideas than I could think of. His throwaway bin was probably worth millions. I can imagine going through his wastebaskets, and “coming up” with all the ideas he didn’t use.
Stan Goldberg: “Jack would sit there at lunch, and tell us these great ideas about what he was going to do next. It was like the ideas were bursting from every pore of his body. It was very interesting because he was a fountain of ideas.
Stan would drive me home and we’d plot our stories in the car. I’d say to Stan,”How’s this? Millie loses her job.” He’d say,”Great! Give me 25 pages.” And that took him off the hook. One time I was in Stan’s office and I told him, “I don’t have another plot.” Stan got out of his chair and walked over to me, looked me in the face, and said very seriously, “I don’t ever want to hear you say you can’t think of another plot.” Then he walked back and sat doen in his chair. He didn’t think he needed to tell me anything more.”
Jim Amash:” Sounds like you were doing most of the writing then.”
Goldberg: “Well, I was.
Joe Sinnott (2010 legal declaration in support of the Kirby estate) :
I got to know Jack Kirby’s work, and remarkable creativity quite well and witnessed his characters and stories as they evolved.
There is no question in my mind that Jack Kirby was the driving force behind most of Marvel’s top characters.
For all of Kirby’s incredible output and amazing creativity throughout his long career, the fact that only the characters at least nominally the creation of the Lee/Kirby team have shown any real long-term commercial viability speaks to the valuable contribution that surely was provided by Stan Lee in some way, shape, or form. Did his contributions wax and wane, with Kirby and with others? I’m sure. Did he overstate his individual accomplishments at times? Hell, I think even Stan would readily admit that. But for all that Pat Ford would maybe like to bury Lee alive under the sheer tonnage of his anti-Lee message board postings — and re- and re-postings — and perhaps try to even some old score by denying Lee any credit whatsoever, I think a more reasoned and reasonable view will eventually prevail.
Not exclusively. See “Captain America.”
“The fact that only the characters at least nominally the creation of the Lee/Kirby team have shown any real long-term commercial viability speaks to the valuable contribution that surely was provided by Stan Lee in some way, shape, or form.” Um, what about Captain America? Or the genre of romance comics (which flourished for decades and which Kirby helped found and shape). For that matter, the New Gods and Darkseid, although not blockbuster characters like Captain America and the 1960s Marvel crew, are still very much part of the DC universe and constantly revived.
I think Lee’s scripting and editing did contribute to the popularit of Marvel comics in the 1960s, and he should get credit for that. But I think Patrick Ford’s point is not about commercial popularity but about artistic value. He thinks that the work Kirby did solo is artistically better than the ones that have Lee’s dialogue, narration, and (often light) editing. I agree with Ford, although I realize that this is a minority position.
I guess I’m also in that minority position. I once tried reading Fantastic Four reprints but it got unbearable after a while. I did prefer Etrigan and New Gods to anything I’ve read from the Lee/Kirby pair.
Jeet Heer: “Um, what about Captain America?”
Well, first, I’ve read that CA was initially created by Simon. Second, it’s hard for me to separate CA’s present commercial vitality from, again, the Lee/Kirby collaborations that reintroduced and re-conceptualized the character with the whole man-out-of-time and survivor’s guilt aspects that writers have been dining on for the past half-decade now.
As for DC’s efforts over the last four decades to find a way to make Kirby’s 70′s characters commercially viable, some very talented people have wrestled and tussled and wrangled with those properties with very little finally to show for it. I may find those Kirby/Royer 25-centers to be some of my favorite comics of all time, but the comics and characters were simply never successfully conceptualized. The Forever People have no powers, no purpose, no motivations, no conflicts, no characters, no relationships. They do have a weird super-car, though. As for Mister Miracle, I’d guess the only people who’ve ever experienced genuine suspense at his theoretically oh-so-dangerous escape acts has been his dwarf assistant and giantess girlfriend (judging by their frequently expressed anguish). Orion rides a strange handle-bar-like thing, wears a red suit, and has a secretly mean and ugly face. The Demon isn’t conflicted by his dual identities, isn’t tormented by his eternal life, isn’t wracked with romantic feelings or human desires that he cannot follow, doesn’t feel torn between his demonic nature and his role as a guardian of mankind.
That stuff that isn’t there in the above characters? That’s some of the stuff Stan Lee brought to the table.
That should’ve been “past half-century” in that second paragraph above.
I’d say the long term viability of the characters speaks to the fact that a series of expensive super suit movies have been made which for inexplicable reasons people go to in large enough numbers to justify still more movies.
My assumption is the movies have almost nothing in common with what Kirby created alone at his home, and passed along to Lee.
The point I’m making is that Kirby was not paid for plotting the stories he sold to Marvel. Lee pocketed the full writers page rate, and as a result Lee is now in the position of having to say he created all the characters himself and simply had Kirby draw the story presented to him.
As far as the writing in the published comic books goes; it’s sleep inducing hackwork on the lower rung of the very low standards found in typical super hero comic books. The only appreciation I could see a person having for it would be along the lines of opening a wraper of red licorice whip vines for a child and getting a nostalgic whiff of the freshly opened package. It might be transporting, until you bit into one and thought, “I used to like this stuff?”
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You’re all so obsessed with this Lee vs. Kirby thing. The facts are beside the point, guys. The work that was done stands on its own merit. They were great comics, made by great men. We all enjoyed them, and the entertainment they provided to us. Let whatever happened between Lee and Kirby, lie between Lee and Kirby. We have the comics to remember, and the inspiration they have given us.
I keep saying, as a thirteen year old, I loved Stan Lee. Then I grew up. I don’t find all of his writing awful, but it simply doesn’t hold up. On the other hand, Kirby’s writing, not being based on any fake attempt to be hip and with the times, does hold up pretty well, along with
the art. I’m not inspired by any of Stan’s writing.
B. In my case it’s different, because I think Silver Age super hero comics are absolutely dreadful aside from the artwork.
I am not, and never was a Marvel, or super hero fan, didn’t read any of the 60′s Marvel stuff until years after it was published.
And while I love the writing and art of Jack Kirby, it’s despite him having worked at Marvel in the 60′s. Super hero comic books aren’t something which I gravitate towards, and everything I like about Kirby has nothing to do with Marvel.
I don’t care what anybody says….Kirby is Marvel. Those Hollywood movies are making marvel money… thanks to Kirby.There’s no doubt i got into comics because of of Kirby’s art. If a comic was drawn by Kirby either marvel or DC, i would have bought it. His art spoke to me. I knew it was a guarantee story with plenty of action. I make sure my kids know who really is the godfather of Marvel…..and it ain’t Stan Lee
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great read ..
Stan Lee’s modus operandi seems apparent .. be the middleman for everybody. a pass through for talent. and take credit for everything.
Anyhow, sooner or later, Jack Kirby will get credit for his creations. Stan Lee will be seen as a liar and a manipulator who as Jack points out here .. took advantage for himself whenever he could.
Not that this is unusual .. it’s human history. It’s the 1% exploiting the 99%. like my daddy always said .. “it’s not how you play the game that counts .. it’s who gets to count the money first” ..
Jack Kirby was a great talent .. who created entertainment empire .. and he got workman’s wages for it .. and the people he made wealthy deny him credit for it.
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After reading this interview and conducting my own research, I am convinced that Kirby created most of these characters without Lee’s help. And, Lee was power hungry to slap his name on all of the comics and greedy for taking more money than he should have. But, it would be incorrect to assert that Lee didn’t do some of the writing.
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The marvel masters of the comic book silver age, kirby, ditko, romita, buscema, and the list goes on, forever unending, will always be remembered till the end of time. Theres something wrong, althoug we weren’t there when it happened, kirby’s understatement for lee, and even ditko’s characters (as polish) shows how he thought of them, the thing is kirby was a free mind, lee was a guy who wanted to control the direction, theres the problem imagine if FF, spidey,hulk,e.t.c weren’t successful, who really created such ‘crap’ might not really be argued today. The thing we aren’t seeing here is that rather than do whats right lee didn’t give kirby enough credit ( but how can a guy who doesn’t trust his own memory. . . .) and kirby was wrong for saying he didn’t do anything at all. Kirby would have outrightly protested when he was given the role of only artist not writer or plotter for many years on many titles before he finally left marvel. And all this problems ,arguements,’false statements and accusations’ , because the players on both sides in the lee vs artist who drew the first appearance of some character refused to give some respect,credit,honour, human dignity to his fellow man, worker, co-creator, artist, writer, inker ,colourist,plotter. I rest my case.
…I find it amazing that Kirby and other artists who worked for Stan, trashed him so publicly, and yet did not turn down an opportunity to return to work at Marvel after leaving. In fact, I would say that working in comics is not a priviledge, but an opportunity, and that it takes either real talent or real production skills to have a run, let alone a career. Jack and Stan both had careers in comics, are iconic figures, and regardless of Marvel’s inability to do what is morally right, both cashed their checks from Marvel. Everyone does what they have to do to support their family; some folks work their whole life, and have no legacy in their field of work. Kicking at Stan’s or Jack’s is like kicking a giant; the giant does not care or notice. The publishing business is , a business, and there will always be business practices that are morally wrong in every field of work. Kirby was a artist, a conceptual genius, and a legend in the industry; but i still think his best work was with Stan Lee.
‘Kirby was a artist, a conceptual genius, and a legend in the industry; but i still think his best work was with Stan Lee.’
Hi Bobby, I think you are wrong. Just off the top of my head: The Glory Boat, The Pact, The great scott free bust out, 2001, the eternals, Street Code, The Demon, the one where Kamandi finds a tribe who treat Superman’s suit as a religious icon and are awaiting his Second Coming, OMAC…! Comics Jack did without Stan, and the very finest you could hope to find. In fact I think Kirby is one of the very greatest WRITERS in the history of comics. Some people might not agree. Have a good day.
good luck in your imaginary world darrell
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There is a documentary out about Stan Lee, “With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story.” In it, Stan himself relates the story of how Steve Ditko requested co-creator acknowledgment for Spider-man from Stan. Stan eventually typed up a note specifically stating Steve co-created Spider-man. This begs the question why would Steve need this? Was he afraid Stan would rewrite history and claim complete creation of the character, or was he concerned that Jack might? Somewhere on the net, you can see the first few pages of Kirby’s version of Spider-man. I think technically Jack could always say he originated Spider-man since he drew the first images, but it’s not at all like the Ditko version. I think Jack gave himself the shaft by not taking credit where credit was due early on. As Jack points out, Stan created nothing before or after Jack. Jack only had moderate success without Lee’s influence. They were like the Beatles–never as good apart as they were together.
“As Jack points out, Stan created nothing before or after Jack.”
Wholly, entirely inaccurate…Stan created major characters with a wide variety of creators. Jack had no successful characters or books other than those created with Lee or Simon (yes, even the Fourth World didn’t catch on until other writers started developing them- Kirby’s much-heralded arrival at DC led to failed book after failed book and within 4 years he crawled back to Marvel). It’s also worth noting that by the time Kirby left Marvel, Stan had ceded much, if not all, of his writing and editing duties to Roy Thomas, so he had no cause to be creating new characters anyway. BTW, Thomas, not Lee, instituted the ‘Stan Lee Presents’ legend on each Marvel title page.
“I would bet my house that Jack never read the books after Stan wrote them; that’s why he could claim with a straight face that Stan never wrote anything except what Jack put in the notes. He was kidding himself; he never read them. I know for a fact that Stan would rather bite his tongue than [insult Jack], because Jack’s success would’ve been his success. There’s no reason to run Jack down. Stan had the position; he didn’t have to fight Jack for it…Stan used to give him credit all the time; he used to say most of these ideas are more than half Jack’s…
Oh, [Stan's] a con man, but he did deliver. Anyone who says he didn’t earn what he’s got is not reading the facts. Believe me, he earned everything he gets. That’s why I never begrudged him getting any of the credit, and as far as I’m concerned, he can have his name above any of my stuff, anytime he wants. Every time I took a story in to Stan—and if Jack were reading it, he’d have felt the same way—I had only partial faith in my picture story. I worked it out and I believed in the characters, but I was only half-sure it was going to work. I always had my misgivings. By the time Stan would write it, I’d start to look at that story and say, “Son of a gun, it’s almost as though I planned it,” and I’d believe a hundredfold more in that story after he wrote it than before—and if Jack would’ve allowed himself to, he would’ve had the same satisfaction. I sincerely believe that. I think Stan deserves everything he gets. – John Romita, Sr.
Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created the Marvel Universe. Neither of them had, or needed, a “co-creator”.
Wow. Kirby is just so full of garbage here, and not just about Stan. So much of this is obviously fantasy – he’s pissing all over Ditko, Simon etc. SO many lies. How about the fact that Kirby never had any success that wasn’t connected to Lee or Simon? Roz claims Stan didn’t do anything without Jack, but really it’s the otther way around- Jack never had one major successful book/character on his own, and his ‘writing’ at DC – and then in Cap after failing at DC and crawling back to Marvel- proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jack didn’t write the Marvel books, while Stan kept creating hit characters with other artists for years. Disgusting. The King’s crown is more than a little tarnished, and his family’s greed doesn’t help.
Regardless, their opinions don’t matter nearly as much as the people who were actually there- Romita, Thomas, Ditko, etc. all of whom acknowledge Stan as, at the very least, CO-creator/writer/co-plotter.
So, nothing Kirby did at DC was a success?
Whether Stan Lee took other cartoonists’ creations and massaged them into success through his scripting and editing is quite a different issue from whether Stan Lee actually really created anything. (If there’s a major character or set of characters that originated in Stan Lee’s typewriter in anything close to its finished form, I’m not really aware of it. Someone illuminate me.)
Of course, Jack Kirby’s bitterness and bad memory led him to some pretty unreasonable credit-hogging on his side as well.
Most commentators seem to decide to be on Team Stan or Team Jack and that’s the end of it. (NYJ is clearly Team Stan, with a vengeance.) If you’re on Team Jack, then Stan Lee’s writing sucks and his editing compromised what might have been far more brilliant work (“and have you read, I mean really read, CAPTAIN VICTORY?”). If you’re on Team Stan, then the Fourth World stuff was an abject commercial and critical failure and only his Marvel work has value (“those Romita SPIDER-MANs — even more awesome!”). Taking a middle position that acknowledges Stan Lee’s editorial/writerly/semi-co-creatorly skills and also acknowledges Kirby’s astonishing gush of creativity and brilliance is a great way to get yourself yelled at by both sides.
Zing!
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Stan’s writing had a surface appeal that, for the most part, doesn’t hold up well for me now. It, and he, appear to be shallow. But, let’s face it, most comics are light entertainment, not intended to last for the ages. At least in the writing part. The art, well, that’s great and has great impact, whether it’s by Kirby, or Romita, Sr. I understand that other tastes may differ.
The number of mainstream comic books where I don’t like the writing and do like the artwork is probably close to 99%. The idea a person should automatically like Steve Ditko and Lee about the same, or Wally Wood and Bill Dubay, or Toth and some nameless writer, or Kubert and Gardner Fox, or Moebius and Jodorowsky is not something I can relate to. In fact if you go beyond comics there are lots of examples I can think of where I am not a fan of both people who are commonly viewed as a “team.” I like John Lennon and have no interest in McCartney. I like Keith Richards in spite of the fact I don’t like anything Mick Jagger has to contribute.
“The idea a person should automatically like ____ and ____ about the same…”
Groth & Thompson… Nadel & Hodler… Gilbert & Jaime… Khosla & Stone…
Random order, eh, doesn’t reflect my preferences one way or the other.
Which I do have. Preferences, I mean.
Kim made clear “about the same” was a misreading on my part. I really should have said there is no reason why a person who likes (say) Stan Lee should like Steve Ditko at all. And to keep this in an area where people are working as a perceived or actual team (Lee and Ditko were not a team, they worked independently from one another, and after Ditko demanded payment and credit for plotting Lee refused to even speak to him), use my earlier example. I like Lennon and have no use for Paul, Ringo, or Yoko. George I’m neutral on. So with Ditko; I like Ditko, and have no use for Denny O’Neil at all. This applies across the board. There is never a reason why a person who likes creator “A” should like creator “B.”
Wait, what? Is anyone suggesting that anyone should “like Ditko and Lee about the same”? I’m not — at all. I’m just saying that the opinions as to the creative contributions of each side of the Lee/Ditko and Lee/Kirby collaborations, both in terms of quality and in terms of impact, seem to pool on the extremes, to “Kirby and Ditko just drew up Stan Lee’s brilliant creations” or “Stan Lee just spewed a bunch of shitty words onto Kirby and Ditko’s brilliant creations and took all the credit.” I mean, if it’s a binary choice I’m being forced to make I guess I’m more aligned with the latter (as I’m sure most everyone here except NYJ is), but I still think Lee’s editorial/managerial/scripting contributions were significant and positive and deserve to be credited.
Stan already has credited his own talents. Ad infinitum.
Allen Smith
Of course. Which doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to push back by dismissing Stan Lee’s talents, skills, or achievements as nonexistent out of sheer vengefulness. If Stan had been a model of modesty, crediting the overwhelming share of creativity (properly) to Lee and Ditko et al., would people be so insistent on pushing Lee’s score down to zero?
Kim, it’s fair enough to not dismiss Stan Lee’s talents out of vengefulness. But suppose one dismisses his talents after a genuine examination of his work, and finds such work wanting? And, more to the point, what do we know is his work, when he didn’t credit the artists with what they were doing along with drawing the stories? The waters have been muddied.
One could hardly blame Kirby for seeking vengeance, if that was what he was doing in the interview—he was the injured party and it never got any better. He died with his grievances unaddressed. I tend to believe he spoke the truth as he understood it, he wrote the stories he drew by the definition that counts: he articulated the characters and events and the manner in which the story progressed from beginning to end, in his drawings and in the notes that he wrote in the margins of the pages. He did this in the days when Joe Simon was inking him and later, when Stan Lee was overwriting him. (BTW I’m not interested at all in Lee’s text, it is among other faults sexist and nearly unreadable and doesn’t hold up nearly as well as Kirby’s own. )
Lee always claimed he had a bad memory, but he didn’t let it stop him from testifying in a way that was contrary to many his own previous statements, in a way that also opposed the testimony of other artists who had created themselves the stories that he overblurbed and then took full credit and pay for writing, just so he could fuck his old partner’s family one last time in a court of law and deny them any scrap of compensation out of the billions of dollars made from the properties based on Jack Kirby’s efforts. No one denies that Lee was an effective salesman or editor, or that he had a way with a turn of phrase that put an appealing gloss on the Marvel comics of the 1960s. But the evidence indicates that Lee didn’t create those concepts, or anything before or since, and there is nothing defensible about the way he has taken more credit than he deserved for work that other people did, while never speaking up for his “collaborators” in any way that counted for all these years.
Hey, I find very little to disagree with here. (We need NYJ back to get any kind of real conflict going.) I think you can look at the 1960s Marvel stuff and the 1970s DC Fourth World stuff, pick either as superior, and consequently credit Stan Lee with wizardly editorial/creative acumen or damn him for glibness and compromise. I’m saying that perhaps sometimes this judgment (which isn’t necessarily a 100% either/or proposition) may be tainted by a visceral loathing for Stan Lee’s (fairly undisputed) self-serving, both personal and corporate, villainy.
I may someday sit down and re-read all this material and discover to my shock that I’ve flipped and now prefer the mad, explosive, heedless burst of creativity of NEW GODS et al. to the slick, managed FANTASTIC FOUR.
Well I was just having a similar discussion with someone about Jim Shooter and proposed an article title which could be equally applied here. STAN LEE OUR MUSSOLOINI: HE MADE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME.
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m72ytbrs4c1r93mfqo1_1280.jpg
Too bad about the loss of “anti-community pacifier” . . . a pretty hard dig in 1967. Do we take Stan’s version that still works as glib commentary today – or Jack’s, which still works as cutting commentary today?
Kirby gave Doom the machine to deal with Occupy Wall Street. And boy did Lee ever need an editor. Check Kirby’s dialogue in panels two and three and compare to all the excess blather Lee added to it. The Kirby dialogue is how the Lee dialogue would have ended up if Lee had written his first and a decent editor had gone over it. That’s the thing about Lee which gets me. His dialogue is like something Harvey Kurtzman would write to make fun of comic book dialogue. It’s a text book example of bad writing.
I think both Stan’s and Jack’s versions would suggest to the bright young reader that this is the Bull Connor machine, but Jack’s is something that makes me jump back a little, in context – because it identifies the people being attacked as communities. It suggested a lot more at work in “pacification” than just the age-old misuse of “justice” to describe oppression. To me, Stan’s version reads like a mutual and thin critique across both sides of the Cold War – close enough to contemporary liberal propaganda against the Soviets – while Jack’s critique lives and works in America.
With Stan Lee, Kirby created the Silver Surfer. Without Stan Lee, Kirby created the Black Racer. Just saying.
Didn’t Kirby create the Silver Surfer also? And did a good job of it until Lee took the character away from Kirby and turned the Surfer, for a while, into a whiny little bastard?
Silver Surfer/Black Racer? I’d take the Black Racer story every time. It’s far better than the Lee rewrite which saw print. If Kirby’s intent for the Surfer had reached print things might be different.
http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/a-failure-to-communicate-part-two/
In 1972 Goodman commented on the failure of the Lee Silver Surfer comic book. Palm Beach Post reporter Don Geringer’s article quoted Goodman as saying (wryly says Geringer), “I think psychologically the average reader didn’t care enough about surfing. So we got a thumbs down.”
That quote is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, and almost makes me like Goodman. I mean…Silver guy on a surf board, black guy on skis…whatever floats your boat. I see no difference. It’s super heroes right. You know…guys that wear underwear and fly around. As Kirby said, “It’s just a surface thing.”
The Surfer vs. Racer discussion is the “Kirby with or without Lee?” argument in a microcosm. I’m a Surfer guy myself, although obviously not the horrible whiny post-Kirby solo-comic Buscema-drawn one, whose only merit is that it did generate a classic Gotlib parody strip. Just for the panel where the Surfer has to take a leak and whips out his dick, and it’s a faucet. I’d like to think Harvey Kurtzman saw that and said “Bravo.”
Sounds like a classic send up of the Surfer, Kim. Never saw that one.
I’m more of a Surfer-Racer-Batman-Green Lantern who cares type. They are all suits of clothes hanging in a wardrobe.
I’ve always felt characters picked up their credo from exposure. After something is around for awhile people get used to seeing them and they no longer look ridiculous. And as far as I’ve ever seen the typical fan hand wringing over the Black Racer has to do with people freaking out because they think a black guy on skis is ridiculous in a genre where a silver guy on a surf board is believable. It’s the same thinking Gilbert Hernandez mocked recently in his interview where he pointed out an out of touch review of SPEAK OF THE DEVIL had complained the story was not realistic. It doesn’t really make sense to go to fantasy genres like super heroes or B-movies in comic book form, and start complaining that Ma Kent could never have made that Superman costume because the fabric is supposed to be invulnerable so how did she cut and sew it?
Anyhow the Surfer as conceived by Kirby Kirby: I went to the Bible. And I came up with Galactus. And there I was in front of this tremendous figure, who I knew very well, because I always felt him, and I certainly couldn’t treat him the same way that I would any ordinary mortal … and of course the Silver Surfer is the fallen angel. Galactus in actuality is a sort of god. He is beyond reproach, beyond anyone’s opinion.
“Fallen angel is a concept that is typically synonymous with a rebellious angel. Biblical commentators use this term as an adjective to describe the angels who are cast down to the Earth…”
The the Books of Enoch refer to both good and bad Watchers, with a primary focus on the rebellious ones.
It’s apparent from Kirby’s border notes ( His lost origin of Galactus in Thor) Kirby intended the Watcher and Galactus were of the same race, and knew one another.
There is a detailed article which displays a lot of Kirby’s pencils and border notes.
http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/rough-surfing/
Lee’s character (because we never saw Kirby’s) is completely illogical. He’s a weepy super sensitive Woody Allen kvetching on a surf board; who also was recently employed as an advance scout by a genocidal planet sucking boss.
One thing that is interesting about Lee’s Silver Surfer is I think it’s a rare example of Lee actually trying to write something he thinks is good rather than dashing off the old stand-up act he’d been doing for so many years he could do it in his sleep. And the result is cringe inducing. It’s like an episode of I LOVE LUCY where Lucy is convinced she can sing the part of Violetta.
According to Mark Evanier the Black Racer was never intended for the Fourth World. It was another concept Kirby had dangled at Marvel trying to wrangle a legitimate contract from them. Carmine Infantino was aware Kirby had been showing Lee new characters, but offering them in exchange for a decent on paper contract. Infantino urged Kirby to introduce as many new concepts as quickly as he could out of concerns Marvel had seen the presentation drawings. It’s the same reason those short back-up stories began showing up. The character LONAR for example was not conceived as part of the Fourth World fabric.
Evanier: The Black Racer was originally to be a standalone character that didn’t intersect at all with the Fourth World. Infantino urged Jack to stick him in there because they knew Jack had discussed the idea with Stan and feared Stan might remember the idea and use it first.
Stan’s contribution to the character of the Surfer was to make him a two faced hypocritical sap. A character who’s been shown to be barely aware of humanity, who’s been leading Galactus to worlds to devour, some of them certainly inhabited (although Marvel tried to fudge this by basically ignoring it), becomes post Kirby a character whining about man’s inhumanity to man. Using the most obvious and trite dialogue possible, and contradicting the fact that he, the Surfer, was indeed a fallen angel, having aided Galactus in his journies through the galaxy. Even back in my teens when this version of the Surfer came out, I could see the flaws in both the character development and the sappy dialogue telling us stupid old teenagers, who in Stan’s mind needed preaching to, that being inhumane to one another was wrong. And this is who people today hold up as a great comics writer? Don’t think so. But the True Believers ate it up.
In spite of the clear evidence in Kirby’s border notes which indicate Kirby created Galactus with the Surfer as a key component of his plot when Lee testified for Disney against the Kirby heirs this is what Lee said.
TSG Reporting 877-702-9580
Page 71
1 S. LEE
2 Q. Could you tell us how the Silver Surfer came
3 about?
4 A. Right. I wanted to have a villain called
5 Galactus. We had so many villains who were so powerful.
6 I was looking for somebody who would be more powerful than
7 any. So I figured somebody who is a demigod who rides
8 around in space and destroys planets.
9 I told Jack about it and told him how I wanted
10 the story to go generally. And Jack went home, and he
11 drew it. And he drew a wonderful version. But when I
12 looked at the artwork, I saw there was some nutty looking
13 naked guy on a flying surfboard.
14 And I said, “Who is this?”
15 And he said — well, I don’t remember whether
16 he called him the surfer or not. He may have called him
17 the surfer. But he said, “I thought that anybody as
18 powerful as Galactus who could destroy planets should have
19 somebody who goes ahead of him, a herald who finds the
20 planets for him. And I thought it would be good to have
21 that guy on a flying surfboard.”
25 But that was all. He was supposed to be a
CONFIDENTIAL PURSUANT TO PROTECTIVE ORDER
TSG Reporting 877-702-9580
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1 S. LEE
2 herald to find Galactus his planets. But the way Jack
3 drew him, he looked so noble and so interesting that I
4 said, “Jack, you know, we ought to really use this guy. I
5 like him.”
6 And I tried to write his copy so that he was
7 very philosophical, and he was always commenting about the
8 state of the world and: Don’t you human beings realize
9 you live in a paradise. Why don’t you appreciate it? Why
10 do you fight each other and hate each other? And I had
11 him talking like that all the time.
20 Q. So, for example, with regard to the Silver
21 Surfer, who decided to essentially take the Silver Surfer
22 and make him a separate character?
23 A. Oh. Me.
With Stan Lee, Ditko created Spider-Man. Without Stan Lee, Ditko created the Creeper.
Yes, which means that Ditko had a hand in creating both characters. And was capable and willing to create characters on his own, without Stan. Of course, Stan could and did create characters on his own as well. What was the name of the character that Pamela Anderson played?
Allen Smith
Maybe not on his own. A stripper named Janet Clover says Lee based the character on conversations she had with Lee during “private” lap dance sessions. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2003-07-11/news/0307110390_1_stan-lee-clover-stripper
That was ten years ago. Wonder how that suit ever turned out? I mean, the very idea that Stan would take someone else’s ideas and use them as his own is ridiculous…:-)
One of my favorite pro-Stan Lee arguments is, “No, he didn’t really write anything of note before or after the sixties but he created really great work with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Moebius, etc.” I mean, sure, but my mom could probably create a pretty good comic if it was being drawn and plotted (or co-plotted) by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko or Moebius.
What’s most interesting about the Silver Surfer to me is that as he first appears, where Stan Lee didn’t “know” or have a handle on the character and would have to rely more on Kirby’s plot notes, the Surfer appears to be created from nothing by Galactus, a naive being who has no understanding of the human condition. Which is why meeting Alicia Masters affects him so strongly.
This classic sci-fi idea of an amoral, powerful being becoming more human through interaction with humans appears to be a recurring motif in Kirby’s solo work and one of the most interesting and challenging of the ideas that superhero comics deal with. It gives the character a potential depth that no-one since Kirby has ever really had the opportunity to explore.
What Stan Lee does when he puts him in his own book and takes him away from Kirby is to turn him into a human (albeit an alien version), separated from his lover through a supposedly noble self-sacrifice that he seems not to notice has now been undone. So his overly sentimental and melodramatic “motivation” becomes “leaving Earth” and “woe is me, I miss my girl”. Whereas the original Silver Surfer was about “Becoming Human” (which opens up the possibility for a much more interesting exploration of the human condition.)
Yes, Kirby was full of hits and misses and it often showed that he needed an editor and possibly a good scripter (to be fair, for his 4th World work at DC he apparently did want to hire scripters and work with other artists but was told it wouldn’t happen.) But even his failed ideas were ambitious and unique and a lot of his supposedly failed concepts are solid enough to work as long as one is willing to commit to the concept, however bizarre.
Stan Lee, I think, did make Marvel a success and he did give a lot of the comics a special sense of fun. But I feel that part of his “genius” as an editor and a marketer was to dumb the books down a little. He replaced challenging concepts with cheap melodrama. Not just with the Surfer. No, they were not as dumb as say 1950s Superman comics (which I love, however silly, but that are likewise dumbed down from the original which could have been a more challenging concept), but they were not what Kirby and Ditko seemed to have wanted to do at that point. And if you track the reported disagreements they had, they were usually about Kirby and Ditko wanting to do something a little more ambitious and Stan Lee making a decision that I don’t doubt was good for sales and more appealing to the majority of readers, but that still impeded them creatively.
Which means Stan Lee was doing his job as an editor. Might he, as a writer, have wanted to be ambitious, too? We’ll probably never know for sure. But if in an internal conflict between Stan Lee the writer and Stan Lee the editor it was the editor who won , then that’s how it had to be if he was going to keep the job.
What Robert says above is all very similar to how I see it and I think pretty obviously the fact of the matter.
I would question the “success” idea on a couple of levels. First of all there are people who have the idea commercial success is indicative of creative merit. That argument is very obviously wrong, and there are many, many examples of hugely successful crap, and fantastic work in the arts which didn’t sell very well. The sphere of comics needs no further example than Krazy Kat to demolish the idea that commercial success proves artistic greatness . I’d also point out Lois Lane sold better than Spider-Man until after Lee left the book (of course Lois Lane is arguably a better book than ASM).
If you just want to look at commercial success for some reason the argument Kirby had no independent success is still empty. In the ’50s Kirby had tremendous success with Romance stories which he wrote, penciled, and inked and the solo Kirby stories were the lead stories in most instances. Simon was not involved in those stories except as a packager dealing with publishers. Simon did write and draw stories on his own during this era as well, but for the most part the two men were not collaborating in the ’50s.
Kirby was also successful at DC. According to Paul Levitz who has the hard numbers Kirby’s Fourth World books were selling well, better than a lot of things DC was publishing, and right before it was cancelled there was talk of increasing the NEW GODS to monthly frequency. When Kirby began working for Marvel again in 1976 DC revived the NEW GODS right after he left. The Fourth World books were selling well, they just weren’t huge hits, but nothing else DC was publishing was either. The Joe Kubert Tarzan comic sold so poorly DC couldn’t justify Kubert’s page rate on the book and replaced him with low paid foreign artists. The Neal Adams Green Lantern was reduced to a back-up feature in the FLASH. It was just a bad time for comic book sales. Marvel’s sales were going down as well. Both DC and Marvel must have sensed the time for super heroes had passed and assuming it was another cycle as seen in the late ’40s they began reviving the same genres which had replaced super heroes after WWII. Horror, Romance, and Science Fiction/Fantasy books began popping up all over. DC asked Kirby to create two new titles in these genres with the plan they would be passed off to other artists. When the sales figures came in on the DEMON and KAMANDI it was decided Kirby had to remain on those books. KAMANDI was a substantial hit, pretty obvious because DC kept the title going after Kirby quit.
So the idea Kirby had no independent success is BS. It’s been shot down by Levitz on a number of occasions but the idea keeps stumbling on (Marvel)-ZOMBIE-like.
The Marvel era is no doubt the worst thing which ever happened to Kirby. On one hand you have the self appointed comic book intelligencia ridiculing Kirby as a fascist-sexist-moron via his association with the stories which were published after having been rewritten by Lee. On the other hand you have the MMMS which views Kirby as the unfaithful bastard who ran away to another company, and destroyed the myth of the happy bullpen. Kirby himself got nothing out of the relationship except a page rate for drawing. His page rate is sometimes reported as “astronomical” but he was paid the same rate as John Romita and Ditko at Marvel (and it’s been said less than Buscema), and he was paid the same page rate as Kubert, Swan, and DC’s other top artists and writers at DC. He was never (there are a few exceptions, two in the ’60s, and a few more in 1970) paid for his writing at Marvel, Lee kept all that, and Kirby was no doubt aware that when Ditko and Wood demanded payment (and in the early ’60s it would have been payment for writing which was more important than credit) and credit for writing.
Lee cut off Ditko completely (refused to speak to him) after Ditko demanded payment and credit for plotting, and Wood’s relationship went south even quicker. Wood described his feelings in a letter to John Hitchcock.
” 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…”
Kirby himself said he should have quit Marvel, but he didn’t have the courage to risk the loss of income having just gotten badly burned by Jack Schiff his editor at DC.
So bitter are the feelings of the MMMS type fan that there are large numbers of them devoted to proving Kirby never had a success without Lee or Joe Simon. There are even large numbers who insist Kirby didn’t write for the S&K studio even though all evidence shows he clearly did most of the writing. This can easily be discerned from the style of the writing as amply pointed out by people like Martin O’Hearn:
http://martinohearn.blogspot.com/2012/12/kirby-analyzes-your-dreams.html
Aside from the style of the text itself, there is ample eyewitness testimony from people who were in the studio that Kirby wrote all the time for S&K. And there is the fact that Kirby’s penciled lettering can be seen on original art pages done for S&K stories penciled by himself, but also on stories penciled by Al Avison, Mort Meskin, and others. Since the S&K Romance comics were very successful the idea Kirby wrote them contradicts the idea Kirby could only have success with another writer and so there are people who insist Kirby was born in Kenya…err…sorry…never wrote anything.
Then you have people who argue Marvel made Kirby, that if it were not for Marvel DC never would have hired him. They maybe still would have hired a raft of people from Charlton like Sam Glanzman (a writer artist) and Jim Aparo, and Dick Giordano, and many others, but people who identify themselves as “JACK’S BIGGEST FAN” will insist DC only hired Kirby because Stan Lee made him a star. The fact is most people who say they are “JACK’S BIGGEST FAN” are really fans of a pile of Kirby’s old toe nail clippings called Marvel Comics. The man himself, and the thing he was most proud of as a creator, his stories, are the objects of scorn.
I really enjoyed Stan Lee’s dialogue when I was a kid, reading those #1-#5 collections Marvel put out in the 1990s. I don’t so much enjoy it now. I’ve always judged his writing in the same way as I try to judge children’s books. I think Kirby might have pushed kids (and stoners) a little further if he had gotten his way.
Amazing that Lee, at 90 yrs old, or something like that, is still playing games like this… You’d think that once you get to be that age maybe you’d just be past all that. What’s the downside for him if he just told the court the truth? Maybe not the harsh cold truth as Pat tells it, but just more or less the truth. Would the mouse break his legs or something?
Re: Pat’s superheroes are “suits of clothes”/interchangeable
Partly agree, however it’s probably *easier* to fix some characters in the public’s mind… For one thing, certain colors seem to work better than others. Red & blue just happen to feature in the two S’s, and Batman has blue as well. Green characters seem doomed to second-string status, and don’t think about trying to be a top-tier PURPLE character… And if you add up a bunch of “cool” traits into one char., then even second-string artists can maybe make it work.
btw… I have a one-of-a-kind “poster” enlargement of a Kirby panel from one of his “2001″ comics, free to Pat or any Kirby fans. I don’t want to throw it away but to give it a good home. It’s actually on adhesive vinyl such as used for signs nowadays, but looks like (and functional as) a poster. Free except for s&h. Contact info is at my site linked here.
Why does Lee continue on with this? He’s under contract and has been since right around the time Kirby left Marvel for DC.
It wasn’t only Kirby who never had a contract of any kind with Marvel, Lee never did either until Perfect Film and Chemical offered him one.
Lee’s contracts were introduced as an exhibit during the discovery process when Disney sued the Kirby heirs.
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2010cv00141/356975/65/28.html
On page two of Lee’s current contract his primary duty is described as serving as a spokesman for Marvel.
If we look at page 3 of Lee’s current contract you can see Lee has been paid a base salary of one million dollars a year since Nov. 1, 2002, and will continue to receive that salary until his death. Even after Lee dies if his wife outlives him she will be paid a half million dollars a year until the time of her death, and Lee’s daughter will be paid one hundred thousand dollars a year for five years after the time of Lee’s passing.
https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.justia.com%2Fcases%2Ffederal%2Fdistrict-courts%2Fnew-york%2Fnysdce%2F1%3A2010cv00141%2F356975%2F65%2F28.pdf%3Fts%3D1298736722&docid=2eae2b42ebfbfbb6f7911c2503ffed20&a=bi&pagenumber=4&w=548
Moving on to page four we find in addition to his salary Lee is offered 150,000 stock options, and on page five we see Lee receives many other benefits including first class limousine service, stays in luxury hotels, a full time assistant, 10% of the profits derived from live action or animated television shows and movies, $125,000 per year for writing the Spider-Man news paper comic strip, and on page seven Lee is given ownership of the FEMIZONS.
The 10% of profits from movies and television could easily eclipse Lee’s base salary, and Lee sued Marvel a few years ago because he felt they were cooking the books and not properly calculating the 10%.
Moving ahead take a look at page eight. See where it says:
“Subject to a material breach of this contract you agree to not contest directly or indirectly the full and complete ownership by Marvel and it’s affiliates designees, or successors of all right. title and interest in and to the Property and Rights or the validity of the Rights conferred on Marvel by this agreement. ”
Now note it continues:
“…or to assist others in doing so. (my bold) EXAMPLES OF SUCH PROHIBITED CONTESTACIEN WOULD BE APPLYING FOR COPYRIGHT/COPYRIGHT RENEWAL.”
If Tim would like he can send the Kirby poster to Stan Lee. Lee’s address can be found on page 10 of the contract.
Now it could be argued that what is Lee expected to do? Piss away a million dollars a year, millions of dollars in payments to his heirs, a private assistant, free luxury hotels and limousines, 10% of TV and Movie profits, and let’s not forget the FEMIZONS. I can easily imagine a scenario where back in 1969 Lee was called into see Perfect Film executives and was told if he played ball he would be well taken care of, and if he didn’t he’d end up with nothing just like Kirby.
The thing is Lee is responsible for the current situation based on his actions back in 1958-1970. Lee has absurdly claimed he came up with the Marvel Method out of the generosity of his heart. He says he felt bad keeping people like Ditko and Kirby waiting for scripts, and he decided to let them work from a plot he gave to them during a story conference. The fact most comics “journalism” continues to parrot that transparent bit of malarkey causes me to recall Tom Sawyer. Only Lee didn’t really convince Kirby and Ditko, and Wood to do his work for him. Rather Lee has convinced comics fans and journalists that he was doing Wood, Kirby, and Ditko a favor by having them write the stories Lee was paid for. There is strong evidence Lee contributed little or nothing to the stories his WRITER/artists created until they turned the finished pages in to Lee. Many of the very first characters Kirby brought to Lee are easily traced to things he worked on in the 50s during his partnership with Joe Simon. While Kirby’s Spider-Man has only the orphaned teen hero, spider powers, the name, and a mechanical web shooting device in common with the published Spider-Man, what is telling is that it could not be more obvious it was Kirby who brought the character to Lee. No matter if much of it was used or not (and those mentioned elements are not insignificant), no matter if the character was based in part on previous work by Jack Oleck, Joe Simon, and Kirby. The point is that it is a clear indication Kirby was pitching ideas from the start. The same is true of the Fantastic Four. Much is made of a synopsis found in Lee’s old desk in the late ’70s. A synopsis Kirby says he never saw. Roy Thomas said, “Even Stan would never claim for sure he wrote it before speaking to Jack.” Shortly after Thomas made that comment in TJKC #18 Stan Lee showed up in ALTER-EGO magazine insisting he was positive he’d written the synopsis before ever speaking to Kirby. And yet the first issue of the FF and their origin story is again so similar to an earlier S&K creation (The Challengers of the Unknown) that it defies logic to think it wasn’t Kirby who came up with the idea. Lee’s story of Martin Goodman getting the idea for a super hero group after playing golf with Jack Liebowitz was eviscerated by Liebowitz who said in an interview he never played golf, or socialized with Goodman. Kirby has always maintained he began pushing Lee and Goodman to try super heroes in 1958 when he was forced out at DC and began selling work to Goodman. Kirby’s costumed hero book The Challengers of the Unknown followed on the heels of the FLASH at DC and commonly featured characters with super powers. The Challengers was so popular it was featured in the tryout book showcase more times than the FLASH, and was given it’s own title before the FLASH. Based on his experience at DC Kirby felt the super hero was the next popular cycle for comics, and says he urged Marvel to follow suit.
Again Kirby’s version is entirely logical where Lee’s story has been shown to be false.
Aside from Kirby both Ditko and Wally Wood have asserted Lee relied on them for plots, and neither of them viewed it as a gift bestowed on them by Lee.
Dick Giordano described a meeting with Ditko:
“With Spider-Man…when I was working for Charlton, maybe that’s how we got together now that I think of it—He came up boiling mad. The dispute was he thought he was writing Spider-Man, but Stan was getting the credit. As proof he showed me a chart he had on the wall that said when certain things were going to happen over the next six issue span. Steve felt it was criminal for someone to take credit for something he didn’t do. That’s what led to the break-up with Marvel and Steve. (COMIC BOOK ARTIST #9 pg.42). ”
Wally Wood commented on his relationship with Lee on several occasions.
“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…
Did I say Stanley had no smarts? Well, he DID come up with two sure
fire ideas… the first one was “Why not let the artists WRITE the
stories as well as draw them?”… And the second was … ALWAYS SIGN
YOUR NAME ON TOP …BIG”. And the rest is history … Stanley, of course
became rich and famous … over the bodies of people like Bill and Jack.
I was coming up with most of the ideas. It finally got to the point where I told him that if he was the writer, he’d have to come up with the plots. So, we just sat across the desk from one another in silence.
A few minor points: A lot is made of Stan Lee’s million dollar salary, but that’s more likely to be an executive salary/pension based on his involvement with Marvel Studios rather than his work as a writer. Also his role as official spokesperson and public face of the company might be valued that way. So it’s not really attached to him “creating” the Marvel Universe. So, while unfair, it’s the standard “executives get all the benefits” kind of unfair, not “two creators treated differently”.
His contract may bar Stan Lee from assisting copyright renewal bids, but it doesn’t and cannot compel him to perjure himself. Or to face contempt of court by refusing to answer questions. Contracts can only compel behaviour within what is legal.
If asked a question point-blank on the stand that settlef the argument in favor of Kirby, however damaging it might be to Marvel, it would hardly violate his contract.
The wrinkle in this is that as Marvel’s only editor at the time it was Stan Lee’s job and duty to make sure all work was produced within work-for-hire guidelines, including his own (for the Femizons etc he had to negotiate with his bosses to get rights, he couldn’t award them to himself). So any “wedge” that existed to undo the work-for-hire presumption would have to allege negligence or improper editorial behaviour on the part of Stan Lee.
Which is what the Kirby case did. It alleged that Stan Lee acted improperly in asking Kirby to produce pages that Lee then rejected without paying for. This was either due to not communicating clearly to Kirby what he wanted (meaning the work was not done at the company’s direction) or allowing him to submit things on spec (meaning it was not done at their direction and expense).
This argument could, if substantiated by the direct testimony of Kirby (which is of course impossible) or uncontested by the testimony of Stan Lee, have meant that Kirby could reclaim copyrights to the bulk of all material he produced at Marvel. Possibly even more than a 50% share since he plotted and drew it. But it rests on Stan Lee not doing his job. And when a highly paid employee costs the company millions by not acting within the guidelines, that’s where they’ll try to reclaim it. Or possibly try to shift the lawsuit so that it becomes a claim against Stan Lee instead.
So in a sense, every dollar given to Kirby by Marvel after a loss based on Lee’s testimony, could technically be money that they’d want to get back from Lee. A lot of commenters I have read seem to think that by siding with the Kirby Estate in this case, Lee would basically hand the family “Free Money”. But what he would in fact be doing is admit to negligent or unethical work practices and possibly expose himself to a tremendous financial liability.
I have no basis for believing that Stan Lee was lying, but if he were, it is far more likely that he did so to protect his own reputation, cover up his own mistakes and avoid such a financial liability. Not out of malice to the Kirbys or out of loyalty to Marvel’s corporate owners.
The idea that Stan Lee could have aided the Kirby case without any cost to himself is just wrong. Yet it seems to be a subtext of a lot of the debate.
But, wasn’t the entire Marvel method a case of Stan not doing the job? DC and most other companies used scripts, the writer and/or editor wrote a script, then gave it to the artist to illustrate. Stan’s method had the virtue of saving time, but if that was the method he was going to use, Stan needed to make clear from the very start who was doing what. On the bulk of the stories where he’s listed as writer, if they were done Marvel style, the artist has done the majority of the writing, Stan has been dialoguer/editor.
I have no idea if Stan got a separate fee for the writing, but I hope it reflected the fact that he was not doing the full job of writing, only a part of it. The artists were doing the rest.
I meant not doing his job as an editor. Not as in “not doing the work”. Sadly, “not doing the work” is not a valid legal argument. Work-for-hire simply means “Giving people money and telling them what to do.” You could give someone a nickel and tell them to make a superhero comic and technically it could be argued as fulfilling the requirements of WFH (though in practical terms there could be a “reasonable man” argument in there). The Kirby case argued that Kirby made comics he wasn’t told to make and wasn’t paid for what they didn’t want.
The last part is the most damning. Larry Lieber testified to Kirby walking into the office with a 5-page Hulk sequence that Stan Lee (his brother) rejected in the office and allegedly refused to pay for, because he didn’t want that storyline.
If Kirby had been alive to testify to the exact same thing, that testimony could have given Kirby the preponderance of the evidence. But since the only ones privvy to the plotting conversations between Lee and Kirby were the two of them, their testimony is the “best” or primary evidence. So Lee’s evidence could only really be contradicted by Kirby or a written contract or other solid evidence, not circumstantial evidence.
Of course, a testimony by Steve Ditko to the effect that he had a similar deal to the one alleged by the Kirby’s could have helped. But I don’t know that they had the same type of deal. Anyway, they burned that bridge when they claimed Spider-Man.
I knew that Stan rejected pages, but had not heard about the incident concerning the Hulk pages. Message to Stan: if you didn’t like the way the story was written and drawn, why not get up off your overrated ass, and write the thing yourself, you know, as the credits read on the comics, Stan Lee, writer?
People get confused about this all the time. The Kirby case argued Kirby created characters in the form of presentation pages which he then offered to Lee who could either accept (THOR) or reject (the Kirby version of Spider-Man) them.
If you look at the termination notices you will see they are not seeking copyright to every issue Kirby worked on 1958-1963. The issues mentioned in the termination notices are specific issues where characters created by Kirby first appeared.
That’s the case. Kirby said he created pitch pages. Lee says Kirby created nothing except penciled pages after Lee had described the characters to him.
Lee did say “his artists” were expected to create characters, but as Lee described it those characters would be what would be called extras in a movie. The example Lee gave was a scene in a bar. He said the bar would of course be populated and so there would be people (characters) standing around who weren’t described in Lee’s plot. Lee said if the artist happened to draw a “sexy bartender” (maybe he was thinking about Janet Clover, or Hugh Hefner’s brother Keith, or Bob Guccione) Lee might decide to give the sexy bartender a line of dialogue and turn her into a real character. According to Lee “his artists” did create characters all the time, but those characters were things like; a robot, sexy bartender, old man with a cane, cop blowing a whistle, man reading a newspaper, etc. Never a super hero or named character, all those were created by Lee. The only exception to this is the Silver Surfer. The Surfer fell outside the 1958-1963 era covered by the termination notices and was not at issue. Lee may have admitted the Surfer was drawn into a story by Kirby because Lee was so explicit about the story as far back as the 1968 Ted White interview, and Roy Thomas has said on several different occasion he was there with Lee when the art package from Kirby was opened, and says Lee didn’t recognize the character. In any event Lee himself brought up the Surfer during his deposition and said the character played no real role in the story. According to Lee the Surfer was just an extra playing no important role in the plot until Lee decided to make him a real character.
QUINN (Disney attorney James Quinn): …So, for example, with regard to the Silver Surfer, who decided to essentially take the Silver Surfer and make him a separate character?
STAN LEE : Oh. Me.
QUINN: And this is — you talked about it before that artists were expected as part of their job…
Of course Kirby’s border notes completely contradict Lee’s testimony, the Surfer was central to Kirby plot.
Unfortunately for the heirs Kirby’s pitch pages are mostly lost. Jim Shooter described holding the Spiderman pitch page “In my hands.” But no one has produced it, not the five page story drew after Lee approved Kirby’s Spiderman based on the pitch page described by Shooter.
The Kirby Spiderman man concerned Disney and resulted in some highly dubious testimony from Lee during the Dec. 2010 deposition. Marc Toberoff described this in a letter to the judge.
(3/28) letter to the judge by Toberoff.
Toberoff: “I cross-examined Stan Lee at a deposition on December 8, 2010. After I
indicated that I had no further questions, Mr. Lee’s attorney, Arthur Lieberman, requested
a break even though the parties had just recently already taken a break. At this break, on
my way to the restroom, I noticed Disney/Marvel’s lead counsel, James Quinn, intently
speaking to Mr. Lee in a corner separate and apart from the other Marvel attorneys. Upon
resumption of the deposition, Mr. Quinn asked Mr. Lee very specific questions to which
Lee immediately responded without any hesitation or reflection.”
MR. QUINN: You recall that Mr. Toberoff asked you some questions in connection with Spider-Man, and there was some testimony that you gave regarding the fact that you — the original pages that Kirby had drawn -Mr. Kirby had drawn with regard to Spider-Man, that you had rejected them?
STAN LEE: Right.
Q. Did Mr. Kirby get paid for those rejected pages?
STAN LEE: Sure.
Q. And did you have a practice at that time with regard to paying artists even when the pages were rejected by you or required large changes?
STAN LEE: Any artists that drew anything that I had asked him or her to draw at my behest, I paid them for it. If it wasn’t good, we wouldn’t use it. But I asked them to draw it, so I did pay them.
Marvel paying for rejected pages is contradicted by Sinnott, Ayers, Colan, Steranko, and Adams, in new declarations of support filed by Toberoff, and other artists in past interviews have said they weren’t paid for rejected pages.
Lee testified he was paid a salary for his duties as editor and a page rate for his writing.
If Lee had to split the writing page rate with Kirby, or Wood, or Ditko that would have cut into Lee’s income. After Ditko insisted on being credited and paid for plotting Lee became so angry with Ditko he would no longer speak to him.
I’ve always thought these comments by Stan Goldberg are compelling.
Stan Goldberg: “Jack would sit there at lunch, and tell us these great ideas about what he was going to do next. It was like the ideas were bursting from every pore of his body. It was very interesting because he was a fountain of ideas.
Stan would drive me home and we’d plot our stories in the car. I’d say to Stan,”How’s this? Millie loses her job.” He’d say,”Great! Give me 25 pages.” And that took him off the hook. One time I was in Stan’s office and I told him, “I don’t have another plot.” Stan got out of his chair and walked over to me, looked me in the face, and said very seriously, “I don’t ever want to hear you say you can’t think of another plot.” Then he walked back and sat doen in his chair. He didn’t think he needed to tell me anything more.”
Jim Amash:” Sounds like you were doing most of the writing then.”
Goldberg: “Well, I was.
What is interesting in this case is the clear contrast of Lee intimidating Goldberg, pressuring him to plot Millie just the kind of comic book which was Lee’s forte prior to the Silver Age, and Kirby described (as he always is) as a wellspring of ideas. Then you look at a near identical statement from Wood where Wood said he told Lee if Lee was going to be paid for writing he needed to start writing. Wood says Lee just stared at him in silence. Right after that Wood was gone.
My favorite assessment of Stan Lee came from Bernard Krigstein, who worked with Lee enough to know whereof he spoke. In his 1962 interview with Krigstein, John Benson, who is no Kirby admirer, asked him: “I guess you know that Stan Lee has been the spearhead of the so-called current revitalization of comics.” Krigstein replied: “I’m delighted to learn that. Twenty years of unrelenting editorial effort to encourage miserable taste and to flood the field with degraded imitations and non-stories have certainly qualified him for that respected position” (from Squa Tront #6, 1975).
I see, so Lee does have both carrot and stick concerns. Plus his wife and daughter he probably wants to see very well provided for.
Pat, I think I get the joke about the poster — you’re saying Lee already profits from all this Kirby work, why not take the poster too? ha. I think it’s kind of a neat image FWIW — maybe 6 or 7 years ago I scanned in a Kirby panel at 600 dpi and had it printed out on a large format printer at a sign shop. The details blew up very well, so you can see all the dots, and printing irregularities. The viewer gets a greater appreciation of the inker’s craft for one thing (I think it’s Sinnot, can’t remember), to see the lines that large. Free to anyone who will cover s&h. You can keep it on its backing paper, or peel it off and squeegee it down onto something…I think it was outdoor rated vinyl, so… put it on your car maybe… :-)
Maybe if I charge $10 PLUS s&h that will make it more desirable? It would be a hassle to mail…
The one thing in all of this is that I understand perfectly why Stan Lee would want to have his wife and daughter provided for. But: Kirby also has living children.
Poster no longer avail.
Tim, One panel blown up large kind of a Lichtenstein look I take it? What a great idea, that sounds like a really nice one of a kind piece. I’m sure you could sell it for good money on e-bay. The fact that it is sort of like a giant sticker makes it even more appealing.
Yes kind of a Liechtenstein look — but much better crafted than anything Liechtenstein ever did! Not that he’s a complete slouch, and he was doing something different, but I think the top comics guys had a subtler sense of line and design.
Somebody contacted me though so the poster is no longer available.
“Wholly, entirely inaccurate…Stan created major characters with a wide variety of creators.”–NYJ, referring to the post-Jack era of Stan’s creative history.
I can’t think of any, but I am thinking back to my childhood. NYJ says Stan turned over most of the writing chores to Roy Thomas before Jack left Marvel, so whom did Stan create post-Jack?
I can think of one: Stripperella. I took a look at Wikipedia, trying to figure out if this cartoon was a “success” or not and found this tidbit:
“In 2003, ex-stripper Janet Clover, aka “Jazz”, aka “Stripperella”, filed a lawsuit in the Daytona Beach, Florida circuit court against Viacom, Stan Lee, and Pamela Anderson, claiming she is Stripperella’s true creator and Stan Lee stole her idea when she discussed it during a lap dance. ”
Is there a pattern here?
By the way, does anyone have a good web site that has sales figures for comic books. Jack claimed his DC books always sold, and I would like to take a look at an authoritative source.
Chris, None of those figures are public at the moment. Here’s what Mark Evanier has said a few dozen times.
TJKC: Why did DC really cancel the Fourth
World books? Was it due to bad sales?
EVANIER: That’s what they said at the time,
that’s what the former publisher still
says. For years, I’d heard his successors at DC say that Jack’s Fourth World
books were among many that they felt
should have not been cancelled, that
sales did not warrant it and you have to
expect some new books to take a while to
catch on. For the Kirby tribute book we’re
putting together, Paul Levitz, who is now the
publisher, specifically dug into the DC files,
looked up the numbers, and gave me a quote that
they were mid-range books. They were selling better
than some books that were continued, according to Paul.
So everyone can believe whatever they want.
Another factor which very likely influenced the reported sales of certain “Hot Books” in the ’70s has been described by large comic book dealers of that era. Robert Beerbohm and Phil Seuling both reported things like the Kirby Fourth World, the Neal Adams GREEN LANTERN and the Kubert TARZAN were selling exceptionally well for them. Beerbohm has pointed out in the days before the Direct Market comic book dealers who moved large numbers (Robert Bell, Beerbohm, Seuling, Rogofsky…) would not haunt newsstands and buy comic books off the rack. Instead they went to local distributors and bought bundles direct from the distributor. This was in the thousands of copies for the largest dealers. Beerbohm reported there was a large New York mail order dealer who sold CONAN #1 in lots of one hundred copies for years after the book came out.
There was nothing wrong with what the dealers were doing, but the distributors having sold copies outside the newsstand distribution system reported those copies as unsold and destroyed. DC unintentionally enabled this fraud by accepting a written accounting rather than the old practice where unsold copies had either the whole cover or top half of the cover torn off and returned to the publisher for a credit. Neal Adams pointed out the GREEN LANTERN comic book was being covered in NEWSWEEK and TIME magazine, yet sales were going down even as the book was getting that media coverage.
As I said,
“If there’s a major character or set of characters that originated in Stan Lee’s typewriter in anything close to its finished form, I’m not really aware of it. Someone illuminate me.”
I remain unilluminated.
But of course NYJ’s “created major characters with a wide variety of creators” leaves a lot of wiggle room. If John Romita came up with a super-villain, his powers, and the plot of the story, and Stan then spent 20 minutes writing glib dialogue for him, yes, you could argue that that was a co-creator situation.
The anecdotes about cartoonists who were discourteous enough to suggest to Stan that he actually write something are pretty amusing.
Agreed. When had he previously shown he could write?:-)
The Willie Lumpkin strip with Dan DeCarlo?
I’ll concede you that one. Anything with DeCarlo drawing it had to be good.
I can’t believe Lee created anything until after Ditko, Kirby, and Wood gave him their finished pages. That is the point when Lee went to work, after Ditko, Wood and Kirby were finished with their part.
Make no mistake Lee’s contribution to the published comic books was huge. And I believe it was Lee’s persona more than anything else which brought Marvel up from the low end of the industry in terms of sales to fairly close to the top. The way he created the impression it was team Marvel vs Team DC was just as important (if not more so) than his writing style. Such was the force of Lee’s personality he would say his dialogue was the first ever to feature words of more than two syllables, that it was intended to be realistic, that it was written in the style of respected films, when in fact it was much closer in tone to the BATMAN television show. John Romita said he tried to build up the personalities of the characters in Spider-Man, but Lee insisted on writing them as “Betty and Veronica.” If Lee wasn’t the face and voice of Marvel it would not have been the Lee?Romita SPIDER-MAN which was their only book in the top ten best selling comics. The Lee/Romita SPIDER-MAN had to have been the most white-bread thing Marvel was publishing, it sold far better than the FANTASTIC FOUR or THOR, just not as well as ARCHIE, SUPERMAN, SUPERBOY, LOIS LANE, or BETTY AND VERONICA.
1969 Comic Book Sales Figures
Average Total Paid Circulation as Reported in Publishers’ Statements of Ownership
Title Publisher Avg. paid circ.
1) Archie Archie 515,356
2) Superman DC 511,984
3) Superboy DC 465,462
4) Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane DC 397,346
5) Betty and Veronica Archie 384,789
6) Action Comics DC 377,535
7) Amazing Spider-Man Marvel 372,352
8) World’s Finest Comics DC 366,618
9) Batman DC 355,782
10) Adventure Comics DC 354,123
11) Archie and Me Archie 345,869
12) Fantastic Four Marvel 340,363
13) Life with Archie Archie 326,488
14) Reggie and Me Archie 276,275
15) Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories Gold Key 272,672
16) Archie Giant Series Archie 271,699
17) Thor Marvel 266,368
18) Incredible Hulk Marvel 262,472
19) Flintstones Gold Key 258,821
20) Archie’s Pals ‘n’ Gals Archie 253,206
21) Daredevil Marvel 245,422
22) Captain America Marvel 243,798
23) Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos Marvel 242,897
24) Brave & Bold DC 242,501
25) Avengers Marvel 239,986
Patrick, I believe those sales figures must be lies. I’ve read, in different forums, where people credit Stan Lee with saving comics, yet these figures show that Stan Lee “written” books couldn’t even outsell Archie Comics. And this in 1969, when Stan’s writing stint on Marvel Comics was nearing its end! How dare you!:-)
Allen Smith
Actually, if you read those figures closely, the only DC books outselling Marvel books featured the (at the time) unbeatable colossuses Batman and/or Superman. Second-tier Marvel comics like Hulk, Thor, and Daredevil were therefore outselling every single other DC comic. (Spider-Man beating Batman at this juncture alone is sort of impressive, for that matter.) And Sgt. Fury beating every single non-Batman-or-Superman DC comic?
Archie is Archie, and outside of that equation.
Again, what you say is true, Kim, but it doesn’t negate the questionable claim by some that Lee saved the comics industry. Admittedly, that Sgt. Fury outsold many DCs is a great example of Lee’s effectiveness at establishing the Marvel “brand”, so that if you liked one Marvel you’d likely enjoy them all. I get that. But, “quality” and branding are two different concepts, I daresay Sgt. Fury the comic book wasn’t any better qualitatively than the DC comics it was outselling. But, again, quality is a slippery concept, all we can do now is look at objective data like sales and each draw our own conclusions.
It’s true that it was pretty much the Superman books selling well for DC. Batman is there and I would assume Detective isn’t in there because DC didn’t publish a statement of ownership in Detective that year.
Spider-Man may possibly have been Marvel’s best selling book because it was a lot like an Archie comic book, or it may have been because it had TV exposure in the form of a popular cartoon show.
I think there are a few things of interest.
Marvel’s sales were more bunched up than DC’s and that is almost certainly owed to the team Marvel loyalty generated by Stan Lee’s promotional abilities. The fairly limited number of titles Marvel was publishing made it possible to be a fan of Marvel, to purchase their whole line and be a Marvel guy, not a DC guy. Because Lee was the only editor the whole line had a pretty consistent tone as opposed to DC which was divided up into editorial fiefdoms. Lee used many of the same devices which had worked for E.C.. The editors, writers, and artists were promoted as personalities, even down to production people. There was a fan club, and house adds playing up the idea the company and it’s fans were something like a family or private club. The success of this tactic is reflected in the sales position of the late ’60s Dick Ayers Sgt. Fury which was apparently selling better than Sgt. Rock which featured Joe Kubert.
Personally I’m not a fan of DC or Marvel comics, but I am pretty familiar with some and have also sampled the odd issue of METAL MEN or the HULK and seen enough I’m convinced there is no valid argument Marvel comics were in any way better than DC. They were all just run of the mill comic books with not much to recommend them aside from the artwork. There are people who thrill at the Lee/Romita Spider-Man and scoff at Jimmy Olsen or Lois Lane, but there are people like Dan Clowes and Drew Freidman who are fans of the DC comics. I know I find a Bill Finger/Dick Sprang Batman comic book from the Jack Schiff era to be more readable than the O’Neil/Adams Batman. It isn’t that ’60s era Marvel and DC comics are not great examples of writing, it’s the fact they are just not an entertaining read.
Marvel did not set the world on fire. The ’60s was on the whole a very bad time for comics sales and by the end of the decade Marvel’s sales were sinking along with those of other publishers, Marvel and DC were looking around for answers, reintroducing old genres which had replaced super heroes after WWll, and looking for some answer to try and retain rack space on newsstands. Things only continued to get worse through the ’70s and without the specialty shops catering to a niche audience the established comic book industry might have vanished. If Jim Shooter and Roy Thomas are to be believed Marvel was on the verge of shutting down until it was saved by a property they didn’t own. The STAR WARS comic book which Marvel paid a fee to publish sold so well it kept the company going. If Marvel had gone under all it’s heroes would be as well remembered today as Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Trigger. I am absolutely positive no more than a couple hundred thousand people had ever heard of IRON MAN prior to the recent film version. In other words without the movies old men would mumble about Roy, and Dale, and Trigger, in their dreams, and no one would know what they were talking about.
Knowing that he’d been around the Marvel Bullpen during some of the prime Lee/Kirby years, I asked Gary Friedrich at a convention not long ago about the whole “Stan takes credit for what others created” idea so prevalent these days. Unfortunately, the con was closing for the day and we were getting rushed out, and, as well, Friedrich’s voice was raspy and weak and just hard for me to understand, but I did hear his first comment quite clearly. “Stan worked all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
Someone should really track him down and get his take on the controversy. He’s obviously not a Marvel Zombie, he’s fought his own battles over his Marvel creations, and, as a writer and not an artist during that time, he wouldn’t have any reason to indulge in zero-sum creation math for his own benefit.
All I know is that, when I do the thought experiment of imagining comics history without Stan Lee at Marvel in those key early years, I just don’t believe any of it would’ve happened. At all. So, no Fantastic Four, no Hulk, no Spider-Man, no Iron Man, no X-Men — none of it. The enormous conceptual leap from Kirby’s Green Arrow and Challengers of the Unknown comics to the Lee/Kirby Hulk and Fantastic Four comics happens with Lee or it doesn’t happen at all. Nothing that Kirby did before then prepares us for the imaginative and visual boldness of the Lee years; nothing he does after has the conceptual and foundational solidity of the Lee years.
My favorite Lee/Kirby story has John Romita sitting in the back seat of Lee’s car as Stan drives Kirby (in the front passenger seat) and Romita home after work. During the drive Stan and Jack are theoretically plotting the next Fantastic Four issue together, but what Romita sees and hears is two creators so excited about their own individual visions and ideas that neither can hear the other for their own talking.
The Marvel Method was such an inherent and horrible victimization of artists by writers that Neal Adams, one of the loudest and most insistent voices for creators rights in comics, purposely came to Marvel from DC to work within that methodology.
Or maybe Neal Adams came to Marvel because he WANTED the job of plotting and designing the stories. Maybe he wanted to be a writer (with or without scripting duties) and was willing to accept less than ideal terms for the opportuinity. DC was always very hesitant about letting people both write and draw stories, and especially about letting artists move into writing. You might say that guys like Frank Robbins were examples of the opposite, but he had quite a track record as a writer before coming to DC.
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Neal Adams in any way approved of artists not getting paid or not getting credit for the work they did plotting out the stories without asking him. And he’s still around, so you can.
Well, yes, my “purposely” presupposes that Adams “WANTED” to try co-plotting the comics, then doing the layouts without further guidance, with the writer then adding captions and dialogue — which, essentially, was the Marvel Method as people knew it.
Adams had just previous to this been writing (with credit, so one assumes with full payment as well) the Deadman stories in Strange Adventures. So, again, we here have an avid advocate for creator’s rights leaving a situation where he is being paid in full for writing and drawing a comic so that he can co-plot and layout a comic without payment beyond that for penciling.
The idea that he simultaneously found this arrangement to be outrageously unfair and purposely sought it out is inherently ludicrous.
As is the idea that one can simply assume that he had no problems with the Marvel method, especially as Kirby, Ditko, Wood appear to have experienced it.
Neal Adams is still alive and apparently in good health , still possessed of his mental faculties and his memory and as far as I understand it still available for interviews. So there’s no need for us to guess at how he felt about the Marvel Method, if anyone wants to know they can ask him.
I think his views on that might be interesting. As would be the views of many other creative people working at Marvel during that period. Maybe, as you seem to suggest, they found it unproblematic, perhaps they saw problems but accepted them as the cost of doing business.
With creators who are dead, we have to speculate based on what we have. With the ones still alive, let’s ask them.
Freidrich wouldn’t have a clue as to how Kirby worked. There was no one sitting in during meetings between Kirby an Lee. That Romita in the car story gets recounted so often because it’s the only description of Lee and Kirby talking there is as far as I’ve seen. And it was not a formal story conference.
The only other instance where a Lee/Kirby story conference has been described is the one described in the infamous New York Herald story. Roy Thomas sat in on that but said in TJKC #18 he had never sat in with Kirby and Lee before, and never did again. He didn’t take notes, didn’t participate, and had no idea why Lee had asked him to sit in. Kirby told Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman the “conference” was a staged event having nothing in common with the usual meeting and that he felt certain Lee was making a fool of himself jumping around and pretending to throw punches. Kirby said little or nothing not wanting to participate in what he saw as an act put on for the reporter.
1958- mid-1963 there was no staff at all. The so called “bullpen” was described by Lee’s brother Larry Lieber. ” It was just an alcove, with one window, and Stan was doing all the corrections himself; he had no assistants. Later I think Flo [Steinberg, secretary] and Sol Brodsky [production manager] came in.”
Pat Ford is, of course, correct that Friedrich did not witness events at Marvel first-hand before he was employed there. I guess I should’ve stipulated that I assumed no knowledge acquired by impossible mental powers on Friedrich’s part.
Even when Freidrich was there he would have no idea what went on between Lee and Kirby. As I said no one knows except Lee and Kirby. No one was every in a story conference with them except for the one time staged event for the benefit of the reporter from the New York Herald where Thomas says he assumes he was asked to sit in as a witness. People have this image in their mind of “The Bullpen” and it’s not based on reality. Aside from that one incident I’ve never seen an account of a Lee-Kirby story conference. The one person who was there on occasion was Sol Brodsky who is no longer around to describe what went on. Mark Evanier did extensive interviews with Brodsky and says Brodsky told him that Kirby’s version of how the meetings went confirms what Brodsky recalls. Evanier was close to Brodsky and employed Brodsky’s daughter Janice Cohen as his assistant for a number of years. Evanier commented on his Brodsky interview.
“ME: The answer is that Brodsky did the interview on “background,” meaning that I promised never to print it. It’s full of a lot of stuff that he wouldn’t want published, especially while certain people or their loved ones are still alive. His daughter has asked me to respect that. “
One possible interpretation is that Lee left as much of the plotting to the penciller as the penciller was capable of doing. Producing the copy would have been plenty of work for one man.
Yet strangely Bob Haney managed to produce all that copy for The Brave and The Bold in the 1950s and 1970s while also plotting the stories. More. Robert Kanigher produced all the copy for the Sgt Rock lead feature in Our Army at War while also plotting it and editing the rest of the mag.
No, it is only Stan who found writing the copy to be all he could handle.
Bob Haney was one of the worst writers in the history of comics.
The competition was fierce. It’s like a ten foot ladder with only a top and bottom rung.
My particular distaste for Lee’s text style is probably the same reason many people like his style. He’s a huge in your face personality sort of like Wolfman Jack, or some other AM Radio station DJ who talks over the start and finish of the songs. I never listen to the radio to avoid that and the commercials.
Which reminds me. I haven’t listened to jazz on the radio in ages. I’ve got a ton of LPs and to be honest I’ve gotten so lazy I almost always listen to music on u-tube through headphones. R. might be able to answer something I’ve thought about though. You know how “all” jazz DJs use the same delivery? Very laid back and quite, deep voice, words slowly enunciated? Where did that come from?
I think Lee “created” as in “thought up” little or nothing at Marvel but worked his ass off as a manager, editor, and final scripter in the company, and those contributions were hugely important to both Marvel’s quality and success, and he should be credited for that, regardless of his failings. If e.g. Charlton had hired Kirby to write and draw FF, THOR, and HULK and Steve Ditko to write and draw SPIDER-MAN and DOCTOR STRANGE they probably wouldn’t have lasted a year. (They might arguably have been better, more idiosyncratic comics.)
You guys are also scrambling the Lee technique of having the artist fully plot and pencil the work and then scripting it, vs. the “Marvel method” employed by post-Lee writers of writing a full plot (as opposed to the traditional full panel-by-panel script) and then doing the actual “writing” on the pencilled pages, which allowed the artist greater freedom in breaking down the pages, for good (artists creating more visually exciting work) or for ill (artists emphasizing the wrong things or literally leaving too little or wrong room for copy, or misjudging the pace and jamming a longer conclusion into a page and a half). I can certainly see Adams embracing the greater flexibility of getting a plot to work from as opposed to a more constricting panel-by-panel script, and the minor additional labor of conceiving the page breakdowns from a plot rather than a script more than compensated for by the lure of being able to more fully engage himself creatively, and this not at all being at variance with his creators-rights stance. And it’s a far cry from Stan’s having the artist come up with the entire story and then (implicitly or explicitly) taking credit for it or only grudgingly handing the credit (in Ditko’s case by giving him a plotter credit and in Kirby’s place by changing the credit to an undifferentiated “by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby” credit).
Surely there are writers and artists around who were working in the 1970s for both Marvel and DC who could address the “Marvel style” plot-draw-write style vs. the traditional script-draw style. There were enough artists bopping back and forth between companies to suggest that they appreciated and accepted both approaches.
I this I remember a story about a CONAN artist being offended because Roy Thomas just tore a Robert E. Howard story out of a paperback and handed it to him and said “Here’s your plot,” but I think I also remember Roy denying the story. I suspect some artists would be perfectly happy with this (and it obviously wouldn’t involve their being stiffed out of “plotting” credits).
Based on what I’ve read what Lee contributed depended on the other person assigned to a book. Why is the Lee/Buscema so uninteresting? Well it had basically the same plot issue after issue. It was not all that different from the TV show Kung-Fu. Kwai-Chang-Surfer rolls into Blackrock and has a bad day. He tries soul searching and reason to no avail and the thing plays out in predictable fashion. Why was it like that? Probably because Buscema wasn’t interested, particularly after he says he tried something he thought was ambitious in SILVER SURFER #3 and Lee ripped the story apart, causing Buscema to complain to John Romita he hated the business. So Lee probably gave Buscema plots like, “Good guy can’t reason with bad guys, have him shoot some rays and fly around.” So Buscema gave Lee 20 pages of the Surfer floating around on his board gesturing like a tour guide. With nothing going on Lee filled up those pages with word balloons containing platitudes.
Daredevil is kind of the same from what I’ve seen in the sense there is not a whole lot going on, so little that Gene Colan could spend a page on the hero opening a door. I’ve never paid much attention to the Colan Daredevil but my vague impression is their are lots of scenes of cars driving around, and noir interiors. Colan got a lot of heat from Jim Shooter for doing the same things Lee allowed him to do. It may have been Lee found Colan’s stories easy to write, because there was a lot of opportunity for “entertaining” dialogue. A Kirby or Ditko plot would be much more eventful, maybe hard to follow based on their notes, and not have the breathing room which allowed Lee to write jokes and soap.
With someone who had lots of story ideas like Ditko or Kirby it makes no sense Lee who was leaning of Stan Goldberg to plot Millie would be plotting for them aside from an occasional “The fans like Dr. Doom can you put him in the next issue.” What Lee did do with Ditko and Kirby was rewrite their plots after they had finished their story and turned it in. This was also a problem for Gil Kane, Bob Powell, and Joe Orlando. Orlando told Mark Evanier he had to do so many redraws to fit Lee’s revised plot it was like drawing two books.
Joe Orlando: I had a story conference with Stan and we hashed it over. He really didn’t seem to have any ideas, but we worked out a plot, and he sent me the synopsis. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. In one line, Stan indicated that he wanted a three-page fight sequence, in a garage, or whatever. Nothing else. So I called and asked him what I should do. He said, “You know, throw some tires around, do something with some oil, make it up as you go.” Well, that didn’t help. I’m not used to working that way. I like a full script.
Dick Ayers: Stan said, ‘I can’t think of a story for Sgt. Fury. We won’t have an issue unless you think of something. When I asked for a plot credit Stan told me, “Since when did you develop an ego? Get out of here!”
Gil Kane: Why doesn’t he plot his own damn stories.
Looking at your Stan Goldberg story it occurs to me that what Stan might have been saying “Oh for the love of God don’t tell me you can’t come up with plots anymore!”
Lee certainly did work hard, and has earned what he’s gotten from Marvel. Others also worked hard and have not gotten what they’ve merited from Marvel.
We start out here with Stan Lee claiming more credit than he deserves, and some wind up overcompensating by denying him any credit at all. The bugger factor it seems to me is that Stan was the boss, the one who ultimately had the power to accept or reject a piece of work. Jack Kirby was a veteran freelancer, and as such was aware of the need to sometimes give the client what he’s looking for. Therefore you can’t rule out the possibility that Stan had a hand in developing the characters. There was no cordon sanitaire keeping him from having an influence. What people wind up doing is claiming that Stan had no creative ability whatsoever and thus couldn’t have created anything, which is more a matter of faith than anything you can prove. One difference I notice (or perhaps imagine) between Marvel and post-Marvel Kirby is that while both deal with superheroes with problems, in the Marvel era the superheroes have the problems of people whereas in the post-Marvel era the superheroes have the problems of gods.
Well, admittedly it’s an odd thing. Obviously, in a strip like Spider-Man, the problems of people, more specifically Peter Parker, were compelling enough to hold my interest. In the other Marvel strips, not so much. That’s why I enjoyed Kirby’s gods with problems schtick. The majority of Stan’s stories, if I wanted people with problems, I didn’t need his stories, I’d turn on a TV soap opera. But, there’s nothing wrong with soap opera if one likes it. I just wanted something different.
Allen Smith
The point is not so much that one is better than the other as one is Lee’s and one is Kirby’s. Maybe.
True. But whether one is “better” is simply a matter of taste. Can’t say that your taste is any better or worse than mine, it’s simply taste. As for Lee’s writing, enjoyed it a lot in my teen years, which are four decades and more past, so I can’t account for why I don’t like Lee’s writing anymore. They say familiarity breeds contempt, perhaps it’s because the Lee style has been at the forefront for so long that it got boring? I shouldn’t do this self analysis in public….In addition, while I think that Kirby and Ditko and the various artists showed they have talent when they were doing things on their own, Stan has never done much at all on his own, so the question, “how much talent did Stan Lee ever have” is always a question. Did he ever write any form of prose stories, novels, plays, etc. where his undiluted talent was on display? I’m not aware of it if he did.
Kirby talked about this issue at length. He saw no difference between gods and men or monsters and men, except the fact that Gods and Monsters had greater power. Despite their power Gods and monsters, and kings, and beggars will always behave like men.
Kirby’s entire interest as a writer was human nature. He explored it as early as the ’40s in the NEWSBOY LEGION stories where a team of four boys living in Suicide Slum deal with day to day problems like, not having any money, being harassed, trying to raise money for a poor woman with a sick child, not having decent looking clothes, and so on. The group was comprised of an intelligent kid called Big Words, a tough guy with a Brooklyn accent named Scrapper who argued constantly with a hot-headed provocateur named Gabby who talked too much, and a peacemaker named Tommy. Later in the early “50s Kirby wrote, penciled, and inked the best romance comics ever to see print. Rather than glamour Kirby’s stories were set apart by strong women characters, and stories played out against a backdrop which often highlighted the social position of the characters and how their place in society’s class system played a large role in the way they were treated.
The Inhumans show up a couple years into the Fantastic Four run at which point you get sense author is more interested in “problems of gods” than those of humans. There is also of course Thor. I don’t think there is a clean split between problems of people/problems of Gods that matches up with Marvel/Post-Marvel.
I do think that the question of plotting/writing credit should be tackled separately from that of plotting/writing compensation. As in any employment situation, if for whatever reason an employee thinks or feels that his total compensation isn’t adequate considering the totality of his work requirements, the simplest and best way to resolve that would be to request an increase in pay. The artists at Marvel weren’t being paid in either writing money or drawing money; there was just money.
I think a likely complicating factor is suggested above by Kim, which is the idea that many of the artists might’ve actually enjoyed the greater freedom and control AND simultaneously wished that there was additional credit and/or compensation involved.
Yes, but again, let’s distinguish between the Stan Lee “You come up with a plot and give me 20 pages” method (or its variant, the one- or two-sentence “plot” that includes things like “they fight for three pages”) and the Roy-Thomas-and-up “Here’s your plot” method. I’m sure most cartoonists under the former system would eventually have become exasperated with being handed that extra work load without credit or compensation, but doing the page breakdowns based on a plot rather than a script doesn’t involve any kind of credit dispute, and the additional workload is not particularly onerous, and compensated for by an added degree of graphic freedom.
As I understand it, a lot of fledling artists worked from Jack Kirby plots. Does anyone know if Jack was paid for that?
Chris, Here’s what happened. Stan Lee was being paid a salary as editor and a freelance page rate for writing. The more pages Lee wrote the more money he was paid. Lee knew Kirby had always been a writer. Kirby wrote just about everything he drew during the ’40s and ’50s, and wrote many stories for other artists employed by the Simon and Kirby studio. Kirby was such a prolific writer he supplied most of the plots to writers employed by Simon and Kirby.
Employment opportunities for comic book writers and artists were very tight in the late ’50s early ’60s and Lee recognized he could exploit the leverage he had. Lee had Kirby, Wood, and Ditko writing stories which Lee would edit or rewrite and then collect the full writers page rate. Marvel’s page rates for artwork were only around half of what DC was paying.
As Marvel gradually began adding titles , and with Kirby already producing as many as a hundred pages a month Lee began trying to find artists who could write, and who would accept Lee taking their share of the writers page rate. This didn’t always work out. Some artists either couldn’t or wouldn’t plot and for a time Lee brought in people like Jerry Siegel, Robert Bernstein, and Ernie Hart to write scripts.
If you go back and look at the stories where Kirby is credited for layouts it becomes apparent what was going on. In every case where Kirby is credited with layouts Lee is credited (and of course more importantly paid) for either the plot, or the script. The math is very simple. The more pages Kirby plotted/wrote the more instances where Lee collected the full writers page rate, or was paid and credited for plots by Kirby. The idea of having Kirby supply layouts had nothing to do with enforcing a house art style. That’s simply Lee’s absurd cover story. Lee also likes to say he came up with his M.O. out of some deep concern that “his artists’ might be left without work while waiting for a script. This would be too funny for words in a world outside comics where people see through transparent BS, but in comic book land Lee’s ridiculous explanations are parroted as the accepted history.
Kirby doing layouts was something Lee devised as a way of getting paid for more pages of writing/plotting being done by Kirby, while Kirby got a greatly reduced rate, less than half of what he was paid for penciling. Figure it this way. If Kirby was able to pencil 80 pages a month he would be paid for 80 pages of pencils and Lee would be paid the full writers page rate for 80 pages of writing. If Kirby was able to increase his story production to 100 pages a month by, penciling 50 and doing layouts for 50 then Lee would be paid for 100 pages of writing while Kirby’s income would drop slightly. If Lee wanted more Kirby artwork it makes no sense he would assign Kirby to layouts which would cut down on the number of pages Kirby could pencil. The Kirby’s layouts were little more than panel breakdowns with the roughest of drawings.
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The recent Lee/Moebius Silver Surfer reprint contained Moebius’ comments on creating the comic Marvel style. I was just skimming the book in-store, but I read enough to see that he drew the comic from Stan’s six-page plot outline, to which Stan then added captions and dialogue. Moebius so enjoyed this process that he hoped to do his next Blueberry albums similarly (which, as he says, is of course closer to how he did his own solo works). It’s a fairly lengthy piece, so I’d be curious to hear from someone who’s read the entirety of it.
I’ve never read the comic myself, so whether Moebius should or shouldn’t be happy with it I’ll leave to others.
Patrick is correct in my opinion, and unlike him, I was (and still am) a true fan of Silver Age Marvel comics.
Take off the ideological/partisan blinders and read what Kirby is saying in this interview about the caste system in comics. One needs to understand what the reality of that ghetto of the Madison Ave publishing/advertising/commercial art industry was in order to fully grasp his meaning.
Comic books were the lowest rung of the ladder, universally considered schlock material produced for juveniles and cretins. A freelance comic artist was the lowest of the low…no better than a roach scurrying around for crumbs of work, and he considered himself lucky when he could find it.
This is why Romita often recounts his astonishment that guys like Ditko or Kirby would actually leave successful strips, no matter how Stan was playing them. These men were mostly lower class kids raised during the great Depression, who as adults worked in an industry in which you were never far from finding yourself back out on the street. It was still better than the factory, which was your other option.
Stan was a relative of Martin Goodman, who was the publisher. If you wanted to freelance for Marvel/Atlas, well then you needed to play along to get along. Kickbacks scenarios to the gatekeepers were hardly uncommon, particularly in those days, particularly small, struggling industries with very limited openings. It was just the way things were. Nobody liked it, but nobody thought it was unusual either.
Stan was the gatekeeper at Marvel; and Marvel/Atlas was a tiny operation in a ghetto industry.
If you wanted to pencil for Marvel, you knew the score with Stan. The origin of what only later became widely known as “the Marvel Method” had nothing to do with giving the penciler greater creative freedom to break down a book (though, that proved a beneficial byproduct)…it was merely a scheme devised by Stan by which he’d be compensated on top of his salary as editor.
The pencil artist would do the actual writing work without compensation, thus the page rate for that would go to Stan, which is how he padded his editors income. If you wanted the assignments, you plotted the book for Stan and cashed your check for the art you turned in. That was the game.
This is what Jack is referring to when he says that there was nobody to complain to. If you wanted the assignments from Marvel, you had to play along with Stan, you as a freelance roach weren’t gonna go knock on Martin Goodman’s office door to bitch that Stan had this set up. This is the advantage that Stan had of which Kirby speaks. Stan sought out artists to bestow the limited slate of assignments who could plot and write the work wherever possible, so that he could take credit in order to get the page rate.
The actual writing credit was a secondary concern, only necessary as a cover for Stan getting what amounts to kickbacks from artists. Later when the Marvel Super-Hero Universe took-off, the credit became worth far more than the page rate…and Stan was smart enough to use his advantage to claim he was the creator of everything.
As opposed to comic books; in real life the bad guy often wins.
He goes home with all the glory and money and the masses adore him.