Stan Lee, Jack Kirby et al...The Birth Of The Marvel Universe
I doubt there’s been
a more polarizing figure in the history of comic books than Stan Lee. Depending on whom you believe he’s a shyster,
a creator, a fraud, a visionary, a liar, misunderstood or an opportunist. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t have a
strong opinion of the man and there are distinct camps, those who believe that
Stan Lee had no input into the creation of the Marvel Universe as we know it
and that he took credit for the work of Jack Kirby. There are those who believe that both Stan
and Jack collaborated, and those who feel that the Kirby camp continually try
to dismiss Stan’s role and place in the history of comic books. Stan, self-admittedly, has a shockingly poor
memory; however this is nothing new – he’s been stating that for decades
now. Stan doesn’t remember things as
well as people would want him to, but then, for some, it matters not – unless
Stan were to come out and state that Jack Kirby created, wrote and edited
everything that Marvel produced in the Silver Age, then they’ll refuse to
believe anything he says. However some
of what Stan says has remained consistent over the years and the bulk of the
following was taken from his 2010 depositions, as submitted in the Marvel vs
Kirby court case. What is important to
remember is that a deposition is taken under oath – if Stan was lying, and was
found out, then the penalties would be severe.
Call Stan what you want, but I don’t believe he’s an idiot, nor do I
believe that he’d be foolish enough to lie under oath.
It’s a pity that Jack Kirby was never placed under oath to detail the
creation of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Spider-Man and others.
Curiously, as I was
putting this together I referenced some other Stan Lee interviews, dating back
to the 1960s. His stories have fairly
much stayed the same, which struck me as being very odd indeed, as the
inference is that Stan has changed his stories over the years. There is the famous story that Stan came up
with the idea for Spider-Man after seeing a spider walking on a wall, but that
seems to be an aberration. It’s also
worth noting that when the stories of Marvel’s origins were being told in the
early 1970s, Kirby was no longer working for the company and clearly Martin
Goodman had no desire to promote an artist working for DC. That might explain some of the
inconsistencies, but, in interviews at least, Stan has remained, for the most
part, consistent.
This isn’t to say
that Stan Lee hasn’t been entirely truthful over the years. I expect that Stan Lee has lied on occasion
when it comes to aspects of the creation of the Marvel Universe, in the same
way that Jack Kirby lied when he stated that he and Stan never collaborated, or
that Stan never wrote anything, in the same way that Joe Simon appears to have
lied when he states that Jack Kirby had no involvement in the creation of
Captain America. Nobody is perfect. Memory is a fickle thing at best, and what
needs to be taken into consideration is that people are asking elderly people
to recall events, decades later, that meant next to nothing at the time. That’s difficult at the best of time.
What we have here is a
small part of the creation of the Marvel Universe, as told by people who were
there and had an active role. The main
focus is on that eternal debate, Stan Lee vs Jack Kirby, with the Lee quotes
coming from a few sources, but mainly from his 2010 depositions. Kirby’s quotes are taken from various
interviews, some from his Comics Journal interviews, along with interviews with
Greg Theakston. Other quotes come from
interviews that I have done, such as Larry Lieber, Joe Sinnott, John Romita and
Dick Ayers. Have a read and you decide
who told the truth – but remember this, ultimately we weren’t there and to make
a supposition that you have that absolute knowledge is dangerous at best.
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I never wanted to be
a writer particularly. As a kid I joined the WPA Federal Theatre. I wanted to be an actor, but there wasn't
enough money. I always loved advertising
and the closest I could get to it was writing copy for a news service. I started writing obituaries for people who
were still alive, and I was writing publicity releases for the National Jewish
Tuberculosis Hospital in Denver, I never knew what I was supposed to be
advertising, whether telling people to get sick to go to the hospital. I had a lot of different jobs, I was I was an
office boy for a trousers company; I was an usher at the Rivoli Theatre, all of
which was pretty depressing. There was a
contest at the Herald Tribune, an essay contest, which I won three weeks
running, and whoever the editor was at the time called me and asked me to stop
entering the contest and he asked me
what I intended to be. I was just out of high school, you know, and I said,
well, I don't know, an advertising man or an actor or a lawyer or something,
and he said why don't you be a writer?
I learned of a job
that was opening up at Timely Comics; they needed a gopher. Timely Comics was a
small operation, they had Captain America, who was one of the biggest at the
time, and they had Marvel Mystery Comics, and Sub-Mariner as well as Daring
Comics and Mystic Comics. Joe Simon and
Jack Kirby had created Captain America, and they were doing the Human Torch and
Sub-Mariner, when I came in. My job was
to really be their assistant. I went down, and I got them their lunch
sandwiches for them, and I filled their -- in those days they dipped the
brushes in ink and used pencil sharpeners, and I sharpened the pencils. I
erased the pages after they were finished. And I did whatever an assistant or
an office boy would do. Shortly
thereafter I started writing back-up features like Father Time, Hurricane, The
Destroyer, and Headline Hunter. I signed that one “Neel Nats. I was writing so
many stories that I thought I should occasionally change my credit. Before I knew it they had me writing Captain
America and they had me doing some editing.
Shortly thereafter Joe and Jack left.
I didn't know at the time, but I have heard much later from a number of
different people that they were supposed to have been working exclusively for
Martin Goodman, and he found out they had been doing some work for some other
company. I was like the only guy left in
the department and the publisher asked me if I could function as the editor and
art director and writer until he hired someone else. And I said, sure. You know, when you're 18
years old, what do you know? I said, Sure, I can do it. He never found anyone and I've been there ever
since.
I met Stan Lee when I first
went to work for Marvel. He was a little boy. He was about 13 years old. He’s
about five years younger than me. I
couldn’t do anything about Stan Lee because he was the publisher’s cousin. He
ran back and forth around New York doing things that he was told to do. He
would slam doors and come up to you and look over your shoulder and annoy you
in a lot of ways. You know, he was the
kind of kid that liked to fool around–open and close doors on you. In fact, once I told Joe to throw him out of
the room. Stan Lee was a pest. He liked
to irk people and it was one thing I couldn’t take. He hasn’t changed a bit. --Jack Kirby
I never thought of it
as a permanent job. It was my job to
dream up new characters or to continue with the characters we had, and to pick
the best artists and the best writers unless I wrote something -- I had the
privilege, which now that I think back, it was rare, but I could either write
stories myself or I could hire writers. I couldn't write everything, and it was
my job to hire the artists to draw the stories. I did that for quite a number
of years but I never particularly wanted to be in the comic book business. I always figured, hey, this is great, I'll
stay here a year or two or three until I make some money and then I'll go out
and be a Hollywood director or I'll write the Great American Novel. And for
years and years I stayed in the job, never thinking of it as my permanent
career. For years this went on, and I was too dumb to realize, hey, this is
what you're doing, Stan, this is it. I always had this feeling of temporariness,
waiting till I've saved up enough money so I can quit and go do something else.
And my wife said to me one day, Stan, when are you gonna realize this is
permanent? And instead of looking to do something sensational in some other field,
why don't you make something sensational about what you're doing? I mean,
you're writing, you are creating...do something really good.
We were living at
Timely under the conditions where every few years there was a new trend. We'd
be very big in westerns and suddenly the western field dried up and we had to
find a new trend and we'd be doing a lot of superheroes and then there was a
lack of interest in superheroes so we had to find a new trend and we'd do
romances or mysteries or funny animals. It
never made a difference to me what type of thing we were doing. The Code was no problem to me. We never put
out books that I felt were too violent or objectionable. They certainly weren't
sexy. I never had trouble putting out books that would be acceptable to whoever
had to accept them. So when this period came around, it was just like another
new trend. Okay, we've got to drop the so-called horror stories and now we've
go to find something else to do. And we did. I don't even remember what we came out with,
but I assume we found something.
Business got bad and
we had to fire a lot of people. I kept
paying our best people to continue doing strips that we really didn't need at
the time, knowing we'd eventually have use for them. I simply stored the strips
in a large office closet after they were done. To me it was an investment both
in people and in inventory. When Martin
one day learned of all the material I had been accumulating for later use, he
took an extremely dim view of what I had done. In fact, a dim view is putting
it mildly. For starters, he told me that he was running a business and not a
charitable institution. Then as he kept warming to the subject, a light
suddenly went on inside his head. Martin realized that he had an expensive
bullpen being paid every week and a closet full of complete unpublished strips. He instantly decided he didn't need both. I
suppose from a business point of view, it was a rational decision, but I hated
it. The bullpen was immediately disbanded. Most of the salaried creative people
were let go, while I was ordered to use up all the inventory material. Martin decided that we would only work with
artists and writers on a freelance basis from that day forward, not assigning
any strips unless they were definitely scheduled to be used. As a result of Wertham's War, the market for
comic books disintegrated, with artists and writers being fired by the baleful.
I was amazed that Martin kept me on, but then he had to have somebody to fire
all those other people for him. Again,
it was indescribably difficult for me. For a second time I was forced to lay
off talented, hardworking people who were more than just fellow employees to
me. I remember the dark day when Martin told me, 'Stan, we have to let the
whole staff go. I want you to fire everybody.'
I said, 'I can't do that.' He
replied, 'You have to. I'm going to Florida on vacation, and someone's got to
do it', and that was that. I was left
with a skeleton crew, which consisted mostly of me. Up until then I had always done mostly what
the publisher wanted. It was not a
glorious period for the comics. Certainly not for our company and our
publisher, who also published other types of books, movie books and crossword
puzzle books and so on. By this time he
had left the comics pretty much in my hands. He didn't have any tremendous
interest. They weren't doing all that well and he wasn't that much concerned, I
suspect.
I had to do something
different. The monster stories have their limitations — you can just do so many
of them. And then it becomes a monster book month after month, so there had to
be a switch because the times weren’t exactly conducive to good sales. So I
felt the idea was to come up with new stuff all the time — in other words there
had to be a blitz. And I came up with this blitz. I came up with The Fantastic
Four, I came up with Thor (I knew the Thor legends very well), and the Hulk,
the X-Men, and The Avengers. I revived what I could and came up with what I
could. I tried to blitz the stands with new stuff. The new stuff seemed to gain
momentum.
--Jack Kirby
--Jack Kirby
In the ‘60s, the
ideas for the new characters originated with me because that was my
responsibility. What would happen is the publisher, Martin Goodman, for
example, with the Fantastic Four; he called me into his office one day and he
said, "I understand that National Comics," which later changed its
name to DC, "I understand that National Comics has a book called The
Justice League. And it's selling very well. I want you to come up with a team
of superheroes. Let's do something like that." It was
my responsibility to come up with such a team, so I went home and I thought
about it. I wanted to make these
different than the average comic book heroes. I didn't want them to have a
secret identity. I figured I'm sick of
stories of where the hero always wins and he's always one hundred percent good
and the villain is one hundred percent bad and all that sort of thing. So I
figured, this time I'm going to get a team of characters who don't hew to the
mold. Fighting amongst themselves, and I wanted to make it as realistic as
possible. Instead of them living in Gotham City or Metropolis I felt I will
have them live in New York City. Instead
of the obligatory teenager Johnny Storm driving a whiz bang V8, he would drive
a Chevy Corvette. I wanted everything
real, and I wanted their relationship to be real. Instead of a girl who didn't
know that the hero was really a superhero, not only did she know who he was,
but they were engaged to be married, and she also had a superpower. I thought I would try that. They all got their superpowers by being in a
spaceship that was hit by cosmic rays. I
wanted them to be a team, but I wanted them to act like real people. So they
didn't always get along well. We called one
of them The Thing, a very powerful ugly guy who would be pathetic. Mr. Fantastic got the ability to stretch his
limbs. The girl, Sue Storm had the ability to become invisible and surround
herself with the force field, and the boy Johnny Storm, her brother, was able
to burst into flame and fly. I took that
from an old Marvel book, one of Timely Comics' first books called The Human
Torch. I always loved that character that had been an android, a robot or something;
I felt I'm going to give Johnny Storm that power. He can fly and burst into
flame. So we had a guy who can stretch,
a girl who could be invisible, and a man who was an ugly monster. And again, to go against type, I thought I'd
make the ugly monster kind of a funny guy. He's pathetic, but he's also the
comedy relief… And he was always arguing and fighting with The Human Torch, who
was always trying to give him a hot foot… And he was always trying to grab him
and throttle him. They all loved each
other, but they never got along well. The more they fought amongst themselves,
the more the readers loved it. The Torch
wants to quit because he's not making enough money. The Thing wants to get out
because he's not getting enough glory and he thinks Reed Richards is hogging
all the headlines. Occasionally a crook gets away or beats them up. They're
evicted from their skyscraper because they can't pay the rent because Reed
Richards invests all their reward money in stocks and the market takes a
nosedive. I tried to do everything I
could to take these super-powered characters and in some way to make them
realistic and human and have them react the way normal men might react if those
normal men happened to have super-hero powers.
That was the way I envisioned them.
I wrote up a very brief synopsis about that, and naturally I called
Jack, because he was our best artist, and I asked him if he would do it. He
seemed to like the idea. Took the synopsis, and he drew the story and put in
his own touches, which were brilliant, he did a wonderful job on it. And it worked out beautifully. Books sold,
and that was the start of the Marvel success, you might say.
It came about very simply. I
came in and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out and
I needed the work! I had a family and a house and all of a sudden Marvel is
coming apart. Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn’t know what to do,
he’s sitting in a chair crying —he was just still out of his adolescence. I
told him to stop crying. I say, “Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving
the furniture out, and I’ll see that the books make money.” And I came up with
a raft of new books and all these books began to make money. Somehow they had
faith in me. I knew I could do it, but I had to come up with fresh characters
that nobody had seen before. I came up with The Fantastic Four. I came up with
Thor. Whatever it took to sell a book I came up with. Stan Lee has never been
editorial minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with
new things — or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or
that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who
was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, I’m
essentially something else: I’m a storyteller. My job is to sell my stories.
When I saw this happening at Marvel I stopped the whole damned bunch. I stopped
them from moving the furniture! Stan Lee was sitting on some kind of a stool
and he was crying.
Stan didn’t know what a
mutation was. I was studying that kind of stuff all the time. I would spot it
in the newspapers and science magazines. I still buy magazines that are
fanciful. I don’t read as much science fiction as I did at that time. I was a
student of science fiction and I began to make up my own story patterns, my own
type of people. Stan Lee doesn’t think the way I do. Stan Lee doesn’t think of
people when he thinks of [characters]. I think of [characters] as real people.
If I drew a war story it would be two guys caught in the war. The Fantastic Four
to me are people who were in a jam — suddenly you find yourself invisible,
suddenly you find yourself flexible. I
felt I should do something new with Ben Grimm. If you’ll notice, the beginnings
of Ben Grimm, he was kind of lumpy. I felt he had the power of a dinosaur, and
I began to think along those lines. I wanted his flesh to look like dinosaur
hide. He kind of looks like your outside patio, or a close-up of dinosaur
hide. People claim that The Thing is a
lot like me, in terms of his personality, and as the series progressed, he
became even more so. He was always at odds with the Yancy Street Gang, a bunch
of tough kids from the Lower East Side. In fact, they’re a thinly-disguised
version of the Delancy Street Gang guys I tumbled with on more than one
occasion. He was a tragedy. Can you
imagine yourself as a mutation, never knowing when you were going to change,
and what you’d look like to your folks or people that you love. Everybody
seemed to associate me with the Thing because he acted like a regular guy. No
matter what he looked like the Thing never changed his personality — he was
always a human being despite his physical change. Ben Grimm always remained Ben
Grimm. I think that’s why the reader liked him — that touch of reality. You
can’t really change a guy unless you injure his brain, or if he sustains some
sort of injury in a situation.
Doom is really a good
looking guy, all he has is a little scratch on his cheek, but he’s such an
egomaniac he can’t stand to look at the imperfection, so he wears a mask. Doom is the kind of guy who’ll come over to
your house for tea, shake your hand, be very friendly, and at the same time his
henchmen are kidnapping your mother in the kitchen, while he chats with you in
your living room. He’s based on somebody
I know, but I won’t say who.
--Jack Kirby
--Jack Kirby
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."
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. 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.
I went into the Bible and I
found the Silver Surfer. Everybody thinks he’s a god, but he’s the Devil.
Silver Surfer is the fallen angel. When Galactus zaps him and says ‘You can’t
go into space again.’ What the hell did God do with Michael the Angel, who was
very, very handsome and thought he was so Goddamned good that he could take the
place of God? So, God zapped him and said ‘Well, you’re goin’ to Hell’ and
that’s where he sent him and where the hell is the Silver Surfer? Among us. Can
he be God? No, he’s exactly the opposite because Galactus can get him any time. They were the first gods in comics and so I began
thinking along those lines. I began to ask...everybody else, other societies,
all had their Gods, but what were ours? What was the state of our society and where
were our mythic figures? Marvel owns him
but I created him and I should be the one drawing him. I know him. I know his real origin and it’s
not what Stan wrote.
I came up with the Black
Panther because I realized I had no blacks in my strips. I’d never drawn a black.
I needed a black. I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers. My
first friend was a black! And here I was ignoring them because I was
associating with everybody else. It suddenly dawned on me–believe me, it was
for human reasons–I suddenly discovered nobody was doing blacks. And here I am, a leading cartoonist and I
wasn’t doing a black. I was the first one to do an Asian. Then I began to
realize that there was a whole range of human differences. Remember, in my day,
drawing an Asian was drawing Fu-Manchu that’s the only Asian they knew.
-- Jack Kirby
-- Jack Kirby
With Spider-Man, that
was an interesting thing. Martin said,
"We're doing pretty good, let's get some more characters." I was
trying to think of something different. I
always hated teenage sidekicks, so I felt it would be fun to do a teenager who
isn't a sidekick but who is the real hero. So that part was easy. Martin said, ‘You can’t have a teenager. A
teenager can only be a sidekick.’ Then I told him I wanted him to have problems....he’d
get ingrown toenails or an allergy attack while he was fighting. “You’re crazy,
Stan. That’s not a hero, that’s a supporting character. That’s a comedy
character.” But the toughest thing is
dreaming up a superpower. So I thought, what superpower can I give him? And it
finally occurred to me, a guy who could stick to walls like an insect, crawl on
a wall and stick to a ceiling. I didn't recall ever having seen any character
like that before. I thought that's what
I'll do. I'm going to get a teenager who can crawl on walls. But then the second most important thing is a
title. Titles are very -- the names of the characters are very important. So I
went down the list. Could I call him Mosquito Man? Insect Man? Fly Man? And I
got to Spider-Man. It sounded dramatic. And I remember I had read a pulp
magazine when I was a kid called Spiderman.
The guy didn't have a superpower. He was just a guy who went around
fighting bad guys. But I thought Spiderman sounds great, I thought Spiderman
would be a good strip. I hyphenated Spider-Man for very distinctive reasons,
specific reasons. I didn’t want it to resemble Superman. I was afraid Spiderman
and Superman were a bit similar anyway, so by putting the hyphen in, it makes
them more different. And again, I went
to Jack, and I gave it to him. And I
said, Jack, now you always draw these characters so heroically, but I don't
want this guy to be too heroic-looking. He's kind of a nebbishy guy. I saw a few pages; I hated the way he was
doing it. Not that he did it badly, Jack, who glamorizes everything, even
though he tried to nerd him up, the guy looked still a little bit too heroic
for me. He didn't make the teenager look
as wimpy or as nerdy as I thought he should. And I realize that really isn't Jack's style.
Jack mostly draws glamorous heroic Captain America type. Not that he couldn't
have drawn it, but he would have had to force himself. So I figured I will get
somebody that it comes easy to. And
nobody, Jack nor I nor anybody, thought that Spider-Man was going to be a big
strip, so it didn't matter. So I said, "Forget it, Jack. I will give it to
someone else." Jack didn't care. He
had so much to do. He said okay and he
went back to Fantastic Four or Thor or whatever he was drawing, and I gave it
to Steve Ditko. And Steve had that kind of awkward feeling. It was just right for Spider-Man, so I gave it
to Steve. His style was really more really what Spider-Man should have been. So
Steve did the Spider-Man thing. I
presented that to Martin Goodman and he said, "Nah, nobody likes spiders.
That's no good." So I said,
"Well, it's not a case of people liking spiders. Remember there used to be
a Green Hornet. I don't think people are turned on to hornets." "Nah, I don't like it. Forget it." I
had a feeling I hadn't hit pay dirt with that one as far as Martin was
concerned, but I always liked the idea. So sometime later we had a magazine we
were going to drop. It was called Amazing Fantasy. Strangely enough, Steve Ditko had drawn all
the stories in that one, now that I remember. Anyway, it wasn't selling well,
and we were going to drop it. Now, when
you drop a magazine, nobody cares what you put in the last issue because you're
dropping it anyway. And we threw it in
Amazing Fantasy in the last issue. And just for fun, I put him on the cover. I
had Jack sketch out a cover for it because I always had a lot of confidence in
Jack's covers. And the book sold
fantastically. So a couple months later when the sales figures were in, Martin
came to me and he said, "Hey Stan, you remember that Spider-Man idea of
yours that we both liked so much? Why don't we make a series of it?"
I created Spider-Man. We
decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created
the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t
do them all. We decided to give the book to Steve Ditko who was the right man
for the job. He did a wonderful job on that.
He was a wonderful artist, a wonderful conceptualist. It was Steve Ditko
that made Spider-Man the well-known character that he is.
--Jack Kirby
--Jack Kirby
The Spider-Man pages Stan
showed me were nothing like the published character. In fact, the only drawings
of Spider-Man were on the splash and at the end. At the end, Kirby had the guy
leaping at you with a web gun. Aunt May was there, and Uncle Ben was a retired
policeman. He looked a lot like General Thunderbolt Ross. Anyway, the first
five pages took place in the home, and the kid finds a ring and turns into
Spider-Man. I thought it would make more
sense if this wall-walking character had soft soles. I’ve always felt that you should be able to
identify a hero by a small part of the costume. The best characters have
costumes like that: Speedball, The Thing, and Spider-Man. I drew the first cover from a subjective
viewpoint. I wanted to put the reader/viewer up front with the swinging
Spider-Man, to be a part of the activity, to see and realize the danger in
falling, in having a sense of swinging along with Spider-Man. The villains were my favorite part of the
strip. Creating them was always a challenge.
--Steve Ditko
--Steve Ditko
I was trying to think
again what I can do that's different. I liked the Thing very much, and I
thought what if I get somebody who is a real monster? And I remembered I had
always in the old movie Frankenstein with Boris Karloff I had always thought
that that monster was the good guy because he didn't want to hurt anybody, but
those idiots with torches who were always chasing him up and down the hills. I thought it would be fun to get a monster that
is really good but nobody knows it, and they fight him. But then the more I
thought about it, I figured it could be dull after awhile just having people
chasing a monster. And I remember Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I thought; why not
treat him like Jekyll and Hyde? He's really a normal man who can't help turning
into a monster, and it would make a very interesting story if when he needs his
monstrous strength the most, the poor guy turns back into a normal man. I could
get a lot of story complications. So I thought that would be good. I needed a name. Years ago I remember there
was a comic book called The Heap, H-E-A-P. I don't remember even what he was,
but I always thought that was some real crazy name. And somehow or other I thought
I will call him The Hulk. It's a little like The Heap, and it has that same
feeling. But I love adjectives like the Fantastic Four, the Uncanny so-and-so,
so I decided I'll call him The Incredible Hulk. Next we had to figure out how The Hulk came
to be The Hulk. So I decided he's a scientist named Bruce Banner. And I'm not
very scientific. All I know are the names of things. I don't really know how
they work or anything. I had used cosmic rays for the Fantastic Four to get
them their powers and I heard the expression "gamma ray"
somewhere. So I said let's let Bruce
Banner be subjected to a gamma ray, and that turns him into The Hulk. But it
had to be in a heroic way. I said the military is doing a test for a new kind
of gamma ray bomb somewhere and some idiot teenager is riding his bike past the
no trespassing sign onto the test area. Bruce Banner in his cubicle sees the
kid, he runs out to save the kid, and says, "Get out of here. There's going to be a gamma ray
explosion." But Bruce Banner had a
rival scientist who was jealous of him, and when the scientist sees Bruce
Banner run out, he says, "Quick. Start the explosion." And the gamma
ray explodes, Bruce throws himself on top of the kid to save the kid, and he
gets subjected to the gamma ray. That's how he becomes the Hulk, and that's how
we know he's really a hero at heart. When
I did the Fantastic Four, we started getting a lot of fan mail. The fans said, “We
love the book. It's great. Oh, it's the best new thing we've seen. But if you
don't give them costumes, we'll never buy another issue.” And I realize there's something unique about
the comic book reader. They love costumes.
I couldn't figure out a way to give a monster a costume. I couldn't see
a monster, The Hulk, walking into a costume store or making one for himself. So I figured I'll do the next best thing.
I'll give him a different skin color. That will always look like a costume. You may not know this, but originally I made
him gray. I thought that a gray skin would look spooky and scary and dramatic.
But when the book was published, the printer apparently had a problem with the
color gray. On one page he was light
gray. On one page dark gray. On one page black. On one page almost white. I said
this will never do. So I decided on another color. See, you can do that when
you're a comic book editor. You can do anything. So I will change the color of his skin. So I
looked around for a color that wasn't being used. I couldn't think of any green
hero. I said, I will make him green. And it turned out to be a good choice,
because I was able to come up with little sayings like, The Jolly Green Giant,
or the Green Goliath, and so forth. And that's how it happened. I could have
thought of pink or blue or any other color.
The Hulk I created when I
saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this
car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the
gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing
in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the
car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly
came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls; we
can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we’re in a rage — you
can tear a house down. I created a character who did all that and called him
the Hulk. I inserted him in a lot of the stories I was doing. Whatever the Hulk
was at the beginning I got from that incident. A character to me can’t be
contrived. I don’t like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of
truth. This woman proved to me that the ordinary person in desperate
circumstances can transcend himself and do things that he wouldn’t ordinarily
do. I’ve done it myself. I’ve bent steel.
I saw him as a kind of
handsome Frankenstein. I never felt The
Hulk was a monster, because I felt the Hulk was me. I feel all the characters
were me. Being a monster is just a
surface thing. I won’t accept that either because I want to know why The Hulk jumps
around, what the limits of his strength are. I feel that The Hulk’s strength is
unlimited for some damn reason I don’t understand. It's just unlimited and when
I had him fight with The Thing, I felt The Hulk broke it off at a point where
he hasn't fully tested his strength.
-– Jack Kirby
-– Jack Kirby
With The Hulk and the
X-Men and Iron Man, I wanted to use Jack for everything, but I couldn't because
he was just one guy. I was looking for
somebody new. I don't know why I thought
it, but I thought what if it was somebody in a suit of armor and what if it was
iron armor. He would be so powerful. I
have always been fascinated by Howard Hughes. I thought I would get a hero like
Howard Hughes. He's an inventor. He's a
multimillionaire. He's good looking. He
likes the women. But I’ve got to make something tragic about him. Then it occurred to me if he -- somehow when
he got his iron armor -- it's a long story -- but he gets into a fight, and he
gets injured in his chest. And his heart is injured, and he has to wear this
little thing that runs the iron armor.
He has to wear that on his chest because it also keeps his heart
beating. And that would make him a tragic figure as well as the most powerful
guy. So I thought the readers would like him even more with that little bit
added to it. I wanted him to be a
playboy, so he has this gorgeous assistant secretary named Pepper Pots. And
he's in love with her, and she's in love with him, but he won't admit he's in
love with her because he figures he could die any minute with his bad heart.
And he loves her too much to make her a widow, and so he never admits to her
how he feels about her, which again is a little touch of pathos for the series. He also has a friend named Happy Hogan, and
it goes on and on. And that was it. I asked Don Heck because Jack was busy with
something else. With Iron Man I still
wanted Jack to do the cover, though.
I did the first Iron Man
story. They have it listed that Jack
Kirby did the breakdowns, but that's not true. I did it all. They just didn't
bother to call me up and find out when they wrote up the credits. It doesn't
really matter. Jack Kirby created the costume and he did the cover for the
issue. In fact the second costume, the red and yellow one, was designed by
Steve Ditko. I found it easier than drawing that bulky old thing. The earlier
design, the robot- looking one, was more Kirbyish. I did the character bits, the scenes with
Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan, and Tony Stark, and all the other things like
that. But what happens with something like that is that the cover is due, like
a month before, so Jack makes up a cover for Iron Man, and the character's
design is right there on it. Then Stan calls me up and says, "You're doing
a character called Iron Man."
That's about it. Jack Kirby is
the one who created most of those characters.
He's the one who was always in there, and he's the one who was
developing all those characters. Stan and he would get together, and they'd
start discussing it together. I try not
to brush the truth into the corner. It's what it is.
--Don Heck
--Don Heck
We tried two or three
times to resurrect Captain America in the 1950s. I don’t know who wrote the
resurrection stories, but they never worked out. We weren't publishing Captain America because
Martin Goodman thought it was just a World War II character and people wouldn't
be interested in it anymore. Then, at
some point I must have said, ‘Jesus, we brought back The Torch and we brought
back Sub-Mariner. They weren’t even a
triumvirate; they were the three biggest ones. Let’s try to bring back Captain America.’
I always loved the character, so I decided to bring it back, besides, I was
looking for another character for The Avengers and he seemed perfect. We didn’t
have a character like Captain America. I tried to write a story where he had
been frozen in a glacier for years, and they found him and he came back to
life, and so forth. The only thing I said, ‘I’m not going to bring them back the
same way, I’m going to try to give them some personality.’ So I said to myself,
‘Now what the hell kind of personality can I give them?’ There was no
personality left; everybody had the whole gamut of personalities. I felt, maybe
I can make him unhappy; I’ll make him a brooding kind of guy. He’s a guy who
worries about the fact that he’s an anachronism, he was born twenty years too
early or too late, he feels out of sync in today’s time. He was living in our
day, but yet he had the values of 20 or 30 years ago. And I’ll make him the most natural leader
that any group could have, because he has all these leadership qualities. But
he’s never quite happy with what he’s doing: does he belong here? Should he?
The one line I wrote that I liked the best–at one point, when he was
soliloquizing, I had him say something about war, he used to follow orders all
the time and he did whatever the government said to do and at one point I had
him say, ‘I wonder if I should have battled less and questioned more?’ And the
reason I remember the line, I must have had five hundred million college kids
over the next few years saying how they thought that was terrific. “I always
felt every character has to have a distinctive quality and when I was a kid and
I read Captain America, the thing that impressed me—he was like Errol Flynn, I
mean, he was such a beautiful man, he was so glamorous and handsome and I
wanted to be Captain America! Sometimes I see him drawn now in some strips and
he’s just a big, tough lookin’ guy. To me, he’s not Captain America. But that was
my feeling about it. I tried to make him
a little bit interesting. Jack just drew
him so beautifully, and the stories worked out so well that he became part of
the Marvel superhero characters, the one that I did not create.
Now I was looking for
something different and bigger than anything else and I figured, what could be
bigger than a god? People were pretty
much into the Roman and the Greek gods by then, and I thought the Norse gods
might be good. I liked the sound of the name Thor and Asgaard and the Twilight
of the Gods' Ragnarok and all of that. Jack was very much into that, more so
than me, so when I told Jack about that, he was really thrilled. We got
together, and we did Thor the same way. I
wanted him to be the son of Odin, who is the King of the Gods, like Jupiter.
And I wanted him to have an evil brother, Loki. And just like the Fantastic
Four were always fighting Dr. Doom, and Spider-Man was usually fighting the
Green Goblin, I figured Loki would be the big villain. He's Thor's half brother.
He's jealous of Thor. He has enchantment
powers. So in a way he's a good foe. Thor has strength, but Loki is like a
magician and can do all kind of things. So that seemed good to me. Then Thor had a girlfriend from legend called
Sif, S-I-F. And I would have her involved in the stories and have jealousy. I wanted some comedy relief, so I decided
there were three guys. I called them The Warriors that I wanted to include a
very fat guy named Volstag, The Voluminous Volstag, I called him, who acts like
a real hero. "Come on, let's go get them." But when the fights start,
he's cowardly and always holds back. Another
guy like Errol Flynn called Fandral the Dashing and a guy like Charles Bronson
in Death Wish. I think I called him Hogan the Grim. And the three of them,
Fandral the Dashing, Hogan the Grim, and Volstag the Voluminous I thought they
could be Thor's friends, and they would provide comedy relief. And it was something that we both enjoyed
doing very much. And Jack was wonderful with the costumes that he gave them. I
mean, nobody could have drawn costumes like he gave them. Thor had a hammer, an enchanted hammer. The
back story was I decided to make him a guy here on Earth, he was lame and he
walked with a cane. And for some reason he went to Norway, and there he met the
Stone-Men from Saturn or somewhere, aliens who were stone men had landed in
Norway and they wanted to kill our doctor.
He rushes into a cave somewhere to hide from them. As they're coming
toward him, but he sees a hammer in the ground, and some kind of a sign that
said -- I don't remember the exact wording, whoever is worthy would be able to
lift this hammer, sort of like the King Arthur legend. He grabs the hammer, and he's able to lift it
up, it seems that destiny had prepared that for him over the centuries. The
minute it lifts it up, he turns into The Thunder God Thor, and wielding the
hammer the takes care of the Stone-Men. He can always become Dr. Don Blake, if
he hits the hammer on the ground, it turns back into the cane that he always
had because he was lame. He walked with a cane as Dr. Don Blake. So he's a surgeon, who walks with a cane, but
when he hits the cane on the ground, he turns into the mighty Thor, God of
Thunder. And that was the idea.
I came up with Thor because
I’ve always been a history buff. I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir,
the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high
school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my
mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school that’s what
kept me in school — it wasn’t mathematics and it wasn’t geography; it was
history. I researched it and gave my
version of it. Stan gave his version of it. Stan humanized it in a way where,
for instance, I might be concerned about Thor’s relation to the other gods. I
might bring up a Ulik or I might bring up something out of the wild blue
yonder, like the Oracle–that great big thing which nobody knew anything about.
I tried to fathom it myself. And Stan would come down to Earth and find Thor’s relationship
with Earth people. In other words, we go up and down the spectrum. All through the years, certainly, I've had a
kind of affection for any mythological type of character, and my conception of what
they should look like. And here Stan gave me the opportunity to draw one, and
wasn't going to draw back from really letting myself go, so I did, and, like,
the world became a stage for me there, and t had a costume department that
really went to work. I gave the Norse characters twists that they never had in
anybody's imagination. And somehow it turned out to be a lot of fun, and I
really enjoyed doing it. 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. 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.
--Jack Kirby
--Jack Kirby
I got the synopsis, the plot
from Stan, and I wrote the first script of Thor. That was it.
The civilian name of Don Blake I made up. And I also came up with his
hammer. I made that, which people know about. My Uru hammer, I created
that. I just made it up, as far as I
know. I might have read it. Stan liked the way I made up names, civilian
names, and I used to, from my years of doing these, what do you call it, these
fantasy books, monster books, and I used to look at the back of dictionary,
Miriam Webster had biographical names and geographical, so I would look in
towns and if I liked the town, I might put it. And it was kind of fun and he
liked what I did. Now, I don't know if I
found "Uru" someplace or I just made it up or whatever. I know I made
it short because I felt that Thor might be around a while and I was always
worrying about the letterer or somebody. I was worrying about somebody else's
feeling, and I figured, well, if I make it U-R-U, there's not that much to
letter. And since nobody knows the name of it, I'll make it a short name. So
that's why I did that. And Don Blake I
just thought sounded like a doctor and, you know, to fit the personality. I
tried to get names that fit the -- the person.
-– Larry Lieber
-– Larry Lieber
With Daredevil, I
gave that to Bill Everett. I figure I
will get a blind man and make him a hero. And how you do that? So I said, what
if all his other senses are very acute? What if he can hear so well that he can
tell if you're lying to him because he hears your pulse rate speed up, your
heart beat, and he can smell so well he can tell if a girl has been in a room. He could smell her cologne, even if it was
two days ago. You know, you get your balance through your ears. So he's like an
acrobat, like a circus tightrope walker. He can do anything any trained athlete
can do. And on and on. I figured that's kind of good. Oh, and he has a radar
sense and a sonar sense. So when he's Daredevil, nobody knows he's blind. He is
like the greatest circus acrobat. However,
he has a law office. His name was Murdock, Matt Murdock, he has a friend named
Foggy Nelson and they have a law firm called Nelson and Murdock. I had him
fighting villains who weren't too super. He didn't fight monsters or anything
and I tried to keep the strip a little more realistic. I loved the character. Jack was busy, Steve Ditko was busy, everybody
was busy, but there's an artist named Bill Everett who had done one of the
first strips that Martin Goodman ever had when he started Timely Comics. And
that was the Sub-Mariner. Bill was still around, and I called him and I said,
"How would you like to draw Daredevil? And he said, "Oh, great."
He drew it, and I put in the copy. It's
a shame Bill was ill or something. He couldn't do too many strips. He did one
or two and then that was the end of it.
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.
-– Joe Orlando (who replaced Bill Everett as artist on Daredevil)
-– Joe Orlando (who replaced Bill Everett as artist on Daredevil)
Stan was the scripter, but 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.
--Wally Wood (who replaced Joe Orlando as artist on Daredevil)
--Wally Wood (who replaced Joe Orlando as artist on Daredevil)
I was plotting from
Daredevil. It was done from plotting, not from a script. That’s why I was
completely befuddled. I even did a romance style splash on my first Daredevil,
but Stan liked it so much that he accepted it and said it was a good
counterpoint. Instead of having an action splash he had Matt Murdock looking
back up at his office in the building and Karen Page looking out the window at
him. In fact he utilized it and wrote, “Don’t let this pastoral scene disturb
you, the action is coming soon enough!”
--John Romita (who replaced Wally Wood as artist on Daredevil)
--John Romita (who replaced Wally Wood as artist on Daredevil)
Martin asked me for
another team because the Fantastic Four had been doing well. Again I wanted to
try something different. And I thought what -- I could think of superpowers for
them, but how do they get their powers? I have already had cosmic rays and
gamma rays and bitten by a radioactive spider. What was left? So I took the cowardly way out. I said I'm
going to just say they were born that way. They're mutants. Now I don't have to
figure out gamma rays or anything. So I decided to have a group of young
mutants. And I really, the more I
thought about it, the more I liked it. I said, they'll go to a school. They
have to keep their mutant powers secret, so it will just say a School for
Gifted Youngsters. Nobody will know it means mutants. And we'll get a professor who gets them
together. And this guy should also have mutant powers, but I will make him have
mental powers. He's got a brain. He can
send thought waves all around, and he can send his thought waves around to
detect where there's a kid with mutant powers, and then he'll ask that kid to
enroll in his school. And again, so that he isn't too powerful, I thought I
would make him in a wheelchair. He's the professor. Then I thought of the characters. There would
be a girl called Marvel Girl, who could do crazy things, and a fella called The
Beast, who looks a little bit apelike. To
go against type, I made him the smartest and the most articulate of all of
them. And a guy named The Angel with
wings, and so forth. And when I went to
tell the idea to Martin Goodman he loved it, but I said, "I want to call
it The Mutants." He said,
"That's a terrible name. Nobody knows what the word "mutants"
means." So I went back, and I thought about it. And I thought Professor X,
Xavier. And the mutants have extra
powers. For some reason I thought I could call them the X-Men. I went back to
Martin and he said, "Oh, that's a good name." As I walked out, I thought, if nobody knows
what a mutant is, how were they going to know what an X-Man is? But I had my
name, so I wasn't about to make waves. Luckily,
Jack was free at the time. And again, he did a wonderful job. Jack was the best guy to work with, you can
imagine. Any idea I would give him, he
could make it better. When Jack brought in the first story, it opened with all
the X-Men fighting in the place they called The Danger Room, where they were
trained. That was Jack's idea. And it was the most brilliant opening because it
started with action and showed all their abilities immediately.
There was a television
series called The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that I used to watch and I liked it. I
thought it would be fun to get something like that as a comic book. So I remembered we had done a war series
called Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, Stories of World War II. And it was
quite popular. I don't really like war stories, so after a few years of doing
it I asked Martin if we could drop the book so we could concentrate on
superheroes and he said okay. But we got a lot of fan mail. The kids loved the
characters. And we kept reprinting those books, and they sold as well as the
originals. So when I wanted to do the
thing like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I thought why don't I take that popular
Sgt. Fury that was years ago in World War II, why don't I say he's older now
and he's a colonel, and he's in charge of this new outfit that I made up,
S.H.I.E.L.D, which stood for the Supreme Headquarters International Law
Enforcement Division. So I took Sgt. Fury, who now has a patch over one eye,
and made him in charge of this group. And
again, there was Jack Kirby. I said, "How would you like to draw Nick
Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?” It was
right up Jack's alley. He loves that kind of stuff and he came up with all kind
of weapons and things.
When I did S.H.I.E.L.D., I had
to go five-to ten years beyond James Bond. I couldn't accept Bond, but he was
the big rage. S.H.I.E.L.D. was to be patterned on the super-secret agent, just
like James Bond. But James Bond already
was and I had to go beyond him–that was my job. I had to experiment with
things. I had to take one leap beyond
James Bond. Every time a James Bond picture came out, I had to have four or
five gimmicks in a story which would allow a reader to see something different
than James Bond. If I had the kind of gimmicks James Bond used, then you
wouldn’t read the comic.
-– Jack Kirby
-– Jack Kirby
The covers in those
days, the covers were the most important thing, because we didn't have fans the
way we do now. Today, fans go to a book store, did the latest Fantastic Four
come in yet? In those days we sold according to how attractive a book looked on
the newsstand. A kid would walk in the news stand, and whatever caught his eye
he'd pick up. This was something that my
publisher Martin Goodman was an expert in. He taught me a lot about what to do
to a cover to make it stand out, what kind of color schemes to use, and so
forth. I paid a lot of attention to
covers. They were very important. I
usually, almost always, would say what I wanted the cover to be. Sometimes I'd
make a little thumbnail sketch. I'm no great artist, but I would just indicate
where I wanted the character. I was very
careful about the covers, and I would say what the illustration should be,
where I wanted the caption, where I wanted a blurb, how I wanted -- whether I
wanted a close-up or a long shot, whether I wanted it to be an action scene or
just a dramatic scene. That I spent a lot of time on.
There was a time when
I was writing so many stories that I couldn't keep up with the artists. I
couldn't feed them enough work. For
example, if Jack was working on a story, and Steve was waiting for me to give
him a story because he had had finished what he had been doing, I couldn't keep
him waiting because he wasn't making money. He was a freelancer. He wasn't on
salary. I would be writing a story for
Jack and one of the other artists might walk in, John Buscema or Romita or
somebody, and they needed a script and if I didn't have a script for them, they
weren't getting paid. They were standing around with nothing to do. So I hadn't finished typing the script for
Kirby, and here is Romita who needs a script. So I said, "Look, John. I
can't stop what I'm doing, but here's the story that I would like you to do. I
will tell it to you. You draw it any way you want. I will put in the dialogue
and the captions later." And he did.
Then Ditko would walk in, and I would say that to him, and Gil Kane, and
whoever they were. Now, it was done originally in order to save time. It was
sort of an emergency situation, but I found we're getting better stories and
artwork that way. Because instead of me writing Panel 1, closeup, blah blah
blah; Panel 2 a longshot from up above or whatever, I was leaving it to the
artist. I would say, “I don't have time to write your
script for you, but this is the idea for the story. I'd like this fill in, and
I'd like this to happen, and in the end the hero ends by doing this. You go
ahead and draw it any way you want to, as long as you keep to that main theme. I will keep finishing Jack's story and when
you finish drawing this one, I will put in all the dialogue and the captions.” That
way I could keep one artist working while I was finishing something for another
artist. That worked out so well that I began doing that with just about all the
artists. I would just give them an idea for a story; let them draw it any way
they wanted to. No matter how they drew
it, even if they didn't do it as well as I might have wanted, I was conceited
enough to think I could fix it up by the way I put the dialogue and the
captions in. I'd make sense out of it
even if they may have done something wrong.
I was able to keep a lot of artists busy at the same time by using that
system. These artists were so good, and
I had worked with them for so long, that I knew what I could expect from them.
And I think they knew what I expected, and what I meant when I would give them
a few words explaining a story. It's like two comedians who had been a team on
stage for a long time, and they could anticipate what each other was going to
say. That I couldn't have done this with an artist I just met, you know, that I
had never worked with. But I had worked with these people for so long. We knew
each other, and we could work where I'd give them a few words, and they could
go ahead and come up with the written drawn story. If they did anything a little different, it
was usually an improvement, and I would change the dialogue and to suit what
they had done.
That was my first
introduction to Stan and to the Marvel style of writing. I had never worked that way before. I was amazed.
You see this very tall, cool gentleman.
You know, a businessman. He’s got
a lot of class about him. He’s
relaxed. He’s talking through a story
and all of a sudden he gets animated. At
one point he jumps up on the desk! He’s
living out a part of the story. I was
completely floored. I was so busy
watching Stan acting out these scenes that… I never expected to see this guy,
this top editor, so caught up in a story conference.
--Ross Andru
--Ross Andru
That whole thing that he and
Jack started was strictly for expediency because he didn’t have the scripts
ready. That’s the reason. It was not done out of any stroke of genius, it was
done out of expedience. Jack would call up and say, “Stan, I didn’t get the
story yet, or the script” and Stan would say, “Ok, what I’m going to do is
describe the first five or six pages in action for you, do them without words
and when you send them in I’ll put the words in” That’s how it grew into the
Marvel method of art first and script second. It was like sunlight had come
into the room because this was a visual medium that had become a verbal medium
for fifty ears, and suddenly it was the visual medium that it had intended to
be in the first place. I think that the biggest thing Stan and Jack contributed
to the industry was that. Visual first was a huge step forward; it was like a
quantum leap.
--John Romita
--John Romita
I felt, we have the
greatest artists; we had Kirby, we had Ditko, we had Colan, we had Buscema, we
had Romita, we had Gil Kane, we had Ross Andru, on and on. All I ever wanted
was to get the guy to work the best he could in his own style. See, one thing that had been said about me—I
used to read it here and there, it wasn’t true–was that I wanted everyone to
work in Jack’s style, I wanted to get a Marvel style, I wanted everybody to draw
the same way. And that’s 180 degrees away from what I really wanted. What I
wanted was everybody to do it differently.
I was very lucky, because I had the kind of artists who were great
visual storytellers, and I'm sure that they dreamed up shots that I never would
have even thought of. So when I got the artwork back from them, it was
beautiful, because they had the freedom to tell the story in their own way
visually. Also, it was easier for me then
to write the dialogue, because as you can imagine, if you're typing and looking
at a blank sheet of paper, you're imagining what the people would say. And
you're imagining how they would look in the drawing. But when you have the drawing in front of you,
and when you see somebody drawn like, aagghh!, you know, you write
"Aagghh!" It makes it so obvious.
And what started as an emergency situation, it turned out, I thought, to
be the best way to do the stories, and that, after awhile, became known as the
Marvel Method. And it turned out to be
quite successful, and we worked that way for years.
It’s a
misinterpretation. The way he would put
it would be oh, you see the way so and so puts his blacks, how he spots his
blacks in the drawings, or how he’s dramatic and does this and does that and
gets more story into it. He’d coach you
that way. But I never had the feeling
that he wanted me to, in fact I knew he didn’t want me to work like Kirby. One day I drew exactly the way Kirby
pencilled, it was a Rawhide Kid I think, I took it in and Stan looked
back and he says “If I wanted you to trace, or if I wanted somebody to trace
Kirby’s drawings then I could hire them off the streets.” He says: “I want you to put stuff into
it.” And then he went on into a long
story about what he wanted here and there and said, “If Kirby only puts a
figure in a panel with no background or anything then you can take your brush
and throw in some background or something and make it a little bit more
dramatic.” And so that was how I made it
look my way and type of stuff where I could touch the inks and touch the
pencils and make it look a bit more realism into it.
--Dick Ayers
--Dick Ayers
Stan would always say, “Joe,
look at some of the EC books and study John Severins work,” because John’s
always been one of my favorites. John
did great war stories and he was very authentic. If he drew a rifle you knew it was
accurate. So Stan encouraged his young
artists to look at other peoples work and draw in a similar style like John
Severin or Jack Kirby. Mainly he told us
to look at John Severin’s work for reference so to speak. If you were to draw an army tank for example,
John’s stuff was so accurate and he really researched his work. All artists did that.
--Joe Sinnott
--Joe Sinnott
I remember there was
one time some artists had wanted an increase in their page rate, and they felt
they weren't getting paid enough. Martin was in a pretty gloomy mood that day,
and he said to me, “You know what they don't realize? They don't realize the
risk that I'm taking, because if the books don't sell, it costs -- I lose a lot
of money, and I have no guarantee the books will sell, and we have periods for
month after month after month where I'm losing money where the books don't
sell. But I don't cut their rate. I don't fire them. I try to keep going as
much as possible.” And he gave me this
whole thing from the publisher's point of view.
This is the way the
conferences went. Very often Jack would
say more than "mm-hmm." You know, he might contribute something or he
might say, "Stan, let's also do this or do that." I mean, we had
conversations. But aside from that, yes,
we would get together. I would tell Jack the main idea that I wanted, and then
we would talk about it, and we'd come up with something. I would give him the outline for the story. As we went on, and we had been working
together for years, the outlines I gave him were skimpier and skimpier. I might
say something like: In this story let's have Dr. Doom kidnap Sue Storm, and the
Fantastic Four has to go out and rescue them. And in the end, Dr. Doom does
this and that. And that might have been
all I would tell him for a 20-page story. If the book was 20 pages long, I'd
receive back 20 beautifully drawn pages in pencil which told a story. Jack would just put in all the details and
everything. And then it was -- I enjoyed that. It was like doing a crossword
puzzle. I get the panels back, and I have to put in the dialogue and make it
all tie together. So we worked well
together that way for years.
When I would give
Jack a rough idea for what the story should be, and he went home and he drew it
in his own way, laying it out the way he thought it would be best, he would put
in the borders, the margins of the pages, he would put little notes -- so I would
understand what he was getting at with each drawing, and he would sometimes put
dialogue suggestions also. Very often I
would write dialogue to fill up spaces. In other words, I also indicated where
the dialogue balloons and the captions should go on the artwork. I might not
have written so much if he had made the face bigger, but inasmuch as there was
that space on the upper right-hand part of the page, I put in more dialogue to
sort of dress up the -- balance the panel with picture and dialogue. That was
something else I had mentioned but I concentrated very much on. I always made the indications for the letter
-- before giving my strips to a letterer, I always indicated in pencil after I
typed out the dialogue where the dialogue should go in the panel and the sound
effects also. When he drew the strip, he
might introduce a lot of characters that he came up with in the story. He might
have decided to have Dr. Doom send some giant robot to get Sue Storm, and he
would make up the robot. Or there might be some other people. Sure, Jack would
often introduce a lot of new characters in the stories. 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.
Stan Lee and I never
collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything[i]. I
used to write the stories just like I always did. I dialogued them. If Stan Lee ever got a thing
dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office. I would write
out the whole story on the back of every page. I would write the dialogue on
the back or a description of what was going on. Then Stan Lee would hand them
to some guy and he would write in the dialogue. In this way Stan Lee made more
pay than he did as an editor. This is the way Stan Lee became the writer.
Besides collecting the editor’s pay, he collected writer’s pay. I’m not saying
Stan Lee had a bad business head on. I think he took advantage of whoever was
working for him. On The Fantastic Four,
I’d tell him what I was going to do, what the story was going to be, and I’d
bring it in — that’s all.
-- Jack Kirby
-- Jack Kirby
I would write and I wrote
stories for Jack Kirby who was so fast; he was drawing faster than I could
write. I had to keep feeding him
stories; he needed them to earn a living.
I think he was living in New Jersey at the time and I’d go to the post
office on Saturday night and send the stuff there. I did that for a few years; and then they
started making up the Super Heroes and I wrote a few of the first, Ant Man and
Iron Man and Thor. Stan again made up
the plots, but I made up the civilian names for a few of them that I
create. Let’s see, the Ant Man was Henry
Pym. I made up the name Henry Pym and
Don Blake I made up for Thor and Tony Stark I made up, you know. But the important names, such as Ant Man,
Thor and Iron Man, Stan made up.
--Larry Lieber
--Larry Lieber
I don't even know the
real reason why Jack Kirby left Marvel. He never told me. He may have just been
tired of having his name always linked with mine. Because when he went to DC,
he did things on his own. He wrote and he illustrated his own books. So that
may have been what he wanted to do. I
suspect that Jack just felt maybe like I felt after all those years, I wanted
to do something different...that he wanted to do his own thing. The first few
years of his career, so many things said by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby...I
suspect he woke up one morning and said, gee, all these years everything has
said by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and he probably wanted to prove how good he is
on his own. I know we never had a fight.
We got along beautifully.
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. First of all, Marvel already
had very popular strips going, and they didn’t throw any ropes around me to
hold me. It was my decision. They knew I was going to make it anyway, and so I
went over to DC to do it. They didn’t
care because they had all these artists waiting in the wings who drew like Jack
Kirby. Kirby imitators. 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.
--Jack
Kirby
I suddenly realized I
was enjoying what I was doing. I could have been writing movies: I was worrying
about characterization, I was worrying about dialogue...When I wrote Thor, I
had him speaking in a semi-Shakespearean manner. Everybody told me I was crazy.
They told me that no little kid is going to read stories whose characters say
thing like get thee hence, varlet!, and I said the hell they won't. Well, Thor
became one of our most popular characters, and I used to get letters from college
kids who'd say I've been reading Thor and I've just noticed that you're
actually writing in blank verse, the meter is perfect, it scans, and they
started discussing it in class and so forth.
I'd get letters from kids who were doing term papers on the origins of
Doctor Strange's incantations and they'd say, well, it's obvious from my
research that you're basing this on old Druid writings. Which was nice to know,
considering I'd never read old Druid writings.
So I felt I was doing things that hadn't been done before. I was able to
get away with it because nobody was really paying very much attention.
I tried to introduce
style. Heretofore nearly all the stories had been done, ours and the competitions,
in the same style. The caption would say
"therefore" or “the next day" or "meanwhile"...that
was the extent of the captions. I tried to write captions that said something.
I tried to develop an informal breezy method of communicating with the reader.
We inaugurated the Bullpen Bulletin Page, kind of a club page, where we brought
the reader into our little circle and made him a friend rather than just a fan
or a reader. Thinking back, the whole
thing was treated like an advertising campaign. The catch phrases, like
"Make Mine Marvel" and "Face Front" and "Excelsior". I did it unconsciously, but it all was in the
direction as though, I guess, as though I was building a product. I wanted to
make Marvel Comics a product that people would love. I was always thinking that the good things I
did would be done outside of comics. Because what the hell good can you do in
comics?
The incredible thing
about it is here we are one form of media that not only seems to appeal to
older people but we still have as many younger readers as any other comic book
group, if not more. We seem to have luckily found the way to produce a product
that can be enthusiastically enjoyed by kids from the age of six to twelve and
also enjoyed and appreciated by one of the most sophisticated and hardest to
please groups in the world, which is the high school and college kids. So I'm very proud of that. I would think
that's one of our biggest successes.
I don't have time to
write refutations. I had picked up a magazine that was one instance out of
thousands of instances, I'm always picking up the magazines and I was usually
always saying hey Roy, Jesus, I just looked at the FF, what a great story, you
never-told me about that plot, it's sensational. I just picked up this, where did you get this
artist, he's the best one I've seen. We
had so many books it was virtually becoming impossible for Roy Thomas to edit
them. If you're producing fifty books a month, how the hell can you edit them
if you're one person? There isn’t even time to read them. After a while an
editor becomes almost a traffic manager.
I really don't think that editorially we had gotten off the track. And
I'm not saying this politically. Don't forget, I was always in editorial
control, I was always determining what books we would put out and what the
style would be. I would oversee the covers. And Roy would discuss with me any
major policy changes if the storylines were going to take unusual directions. But I left the actual editing and art
direction to Roy. And I was perfectly happy, the books were absolutely in the
direction I wanted them to be. Had they not been I would have changed them, because
it's much too important a business, and too personal a business, for me to
allow the books not to be the way I feel they should be.
In the first fifteen
years or so that I was the head writer and editor at Timely and Atlas, I
remember, my wife and I would go to cocktail parties and somebody would say,
what do you do, and I'd say, “Oh, I'm a writer.” “Really? What do you write?” And I'd start getting a little nervous and I'd
say, “Uh, magazine stories,” “Really? What magazine?” And I knew there was no
way of avoiding it, and I'd end up saying comic books, and suddenly the
person's expression would change, “Oh, isn't that nice,” and walk away, you
know, looking for some television or radio or novelist celebrity. That's all changed now. I go to places and
I'm held up as one of the more interesting celebrities and people go over to
the playwrights, you know, and say hey, I want you to meet Stan Lee, he's the
head of Marvel Comics, and he made up Spiderman. And I must say I'm very happy
that this has happened. It's like achieving one of my goals, because I remember
I wrote an editorial, it must have been a good fifteen years ago, and I said
one of our main objectives would be bringing some additional measure of respect
to comics, that I would consider myself and our company successful if we found
a way before we were through this vale of tears to elevate comics in the minds
of the public. So that if somebody said, I write comics, or I draw for comics,
that people would say, hey, really? Tell us about it, and not say, a grown man
like you? You know what I mean? So from that point of view I'm very happy now.
[i] According to Greg
Theakston, Stan Lee was approached with the view of suing either The Comics
Journal and/or Jack Kirby about this statement.
As Theakston recounts it in his book, Jack Magic Vol II: “I immediately called Roz and was astonished when
she justified their stand with “If Stan Lee can lie, so can we.” In the
interview Jack claims that Stan Lee never wrote anything, didn’t really edit
the books, couldn’t spell and didn’t come up with any of the characters. I
said, “Stan has written tons of stuff.” And Roz countered “Not on Jack’s work.
Jack wrote those stories.” “Okay, even if that were true, he certainly wrote for
Don Heck, Dick Ayers and others.” “We were talking about Jack.” “But, Jack said
Stan didn’t write ‘anything,’ which is wrong. He could sue you if he wanted. And
it finally settled in with a quiet “Oh, my.” I immediately dialed Stan, who was
quite reasonably steamed about the piece. “Greg, I’ve already had three lawyers
call to offer to sue on my behalf but I’m not gonna do it. I’m not going to
make things worse than they are.” I explained how sorry the Kirbys were, that
things were spoken in the heat of the moment that should never have made it
into print. “Gary (Groth) should have known better,” was his answer. “I’d sue
Gary but I’d have to drag the Kirbys into it. So, I’m washing my hands of it.” Stan
has a fair amount of detractors, but I’m not one of them because of this kind
of generosity.”
Comments
I believe that Stan and Jack had an understanding in the creativity department...they worked off each others Genius and collaborated.
I firmly believe in the panels I sat in on at CONS from the accounts I first hand heard from both fella's...they were a team...except for the art...whatever Stan say's he created...it's half true. I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Lee mentioned in his deposition he was paid a salary as editor, and a page rate for writing. The artists were plotting the stories, and Lee was taking the whole page rate for himself.
Also, I don't think, in the main, that it's entirely fair to say that anybody 'lied' as such - it's just that accuracy sometimes fell victim to faulty memories so long after the events.
And based on Lee's deposition the artists created nothing but the drawings. One thing Disney did in the deposition was take Lee through the creative process, and Lee is very specific in crediting the artists with nothing except the art. I'd invite anyone who has read the deposition to find one (aside from the Silver Surfer) instance where Lee credits an artist with anything you could put a name on.
What Lee does is lavish praise on the artists as artists. As a matter of fact there is a long section of the deposition where Toberoff asks Lee to explain a long list of old interview statements, and sections of the Origins books where Lee has acknowledged the artists contributions to the plots, and Lee now says he only said those things to make the artists "feel like we were doing it together."
We only get to see a bit of this because Disney had control of which portions of the depositions were made public, but it's clear that portion of the deposition went on for a very long time based on Lee's comment at one point about the length of the cross-examination, and the large number of exhibits Toberoff was going over.
But as we clarified once before. When you worked at a publishing house like that back then there was a mutual understanding that the HOUSE held all the intellectual properties on characters and so on. Being that Stan was the Big Chief and he stamped his name all over everything , he is the guy who takes the credit.
No disrespect to Wally or Steve but...Steve Ditko is a bit of a recluse and always has been. There is no doubt his eccentricities were no less apparent back then. BUT...keep in mind you think Amazing Fantasy 15..you're thinking Ditko. Not Lee.
Legendary comic books drawn by a great artist.
However, Wally Wood...eccentricities...problems , troubles. Do we need to go there?
I love Stan Lee and Jack and Steve and Wally and Dick Ayers and even Larry...
Marvel comics is the power house owned by the powerhouse for one reason. It's Timeless...I enjoy the art and stories for what they are worth. Pure imaginitive entertainment. It's kind of a shame that business is business...because people deserve credit where it's due.
I never thought there'd ever be court cases like this and so many others. But there are. That is sad indeed.
BTW since Lee is still around would someone please ask him, "Stan aside from the Silver Surfer can you give us the name of one character which Kirby brought to you?"
For years Stan's fans have made one of their arguments Kirby had way to many ideas, and needed Stan to reign him in. Yet as Stan explains it in his deposition Kirby and the other artists contributions to the stories were limited to graphic story telling and "set decoration."
Because there are no documents from the era in question (1958-1963) there is no way for anyone to proved anything. Lee made a number of statements under oath which were contradicted by just about every witness, including his brother Larry, and John Romita. The most specific example is Lee claiming Marvel always paid artists for rejected pages, and redraws. This wasn't a casual comment by Lee, his testimony about artists being paid for rejected pages, and redraws was made after James Quinn was seen talking to Lee during a break in testimony, and Quinn (as pointed out by Toberoff) questioned Lee about those issues right after the break which followed Toberoff's direct questioning of Lee in Dec 2010. Since there are no contracts you are left with Lee saying artists were paid for rejected pages, and redraws, and his brother Larry, John Romita, Gene Colan, Dick Ayers, and Joe Sinnott all saying they were paid only for pages accepted for publication.
In addition deposition statements may be amended or retracted prior to an actual trial, so even in the event some hard evidence was found indicating artists were not paid for rejected work, Lee would have been able to say he'd forgotten.
As the judge pointed out in her ruling Lee there was no one to counter Lee's testimony on most of the key points.
In my view the estates mistake was relying on Evanier and Morrow as their primary witnesses. Evanier and Morrow have a Kirby bias, but the fact is they have a Lee bias as well, particularly John Morrow who is publishing many for profit books and magazines about Marvel and Lee.
To have any chance the estate needed to call Ditko, Sinnott, Ayers, and Stan Goldberg. Very late in discovery they produced short declarations in support of Kirby from Gene Colan, Ayers, and Sinnott, but none of them were the subjects of a deposition.
One must also remember that Lee has been the subject of a concerted attack in some quarters for many years, in an attempt to diminish - or completely negate - his contribution. Is it any wonder that he's on the defensive, as well as on the spot. Marvel, who he works for, remember, have obviously gone to him and said "Stan, downplay the collaborative aspect - it gives them something to use against us."
Which is not necessarily to suggest that Marvel are trying to deny anything from those it rightfully belongs to just for the mere sake of it, but that they are aware that conceding even the smallest claim of those opposing them could have a disproportionate effect in how such an admission may be used against them.
Example: Stan at one time had no problem in crediting Steve Ditko as a full and equal collaborator in the creation of Spider-Man. (In how the finished product appeared to the public - not in the concept.) Now, Ditko doesn't seem interested in pursuing a claim, but Marvel's lawyers can obviously see how such an admission could open the door to a claim on copyrights and royalties by Ditko if he was so inclined, which, from Marvel's point of view, they don't believe he is legitimately entitled to under the 'work for hire' agreement.
Is it therefore any wonder that Stan finds himself between a rock and a hard place? I don't envy him. If I thought that giving credit to the guy who wallpapered my livingroom gave him a claim on the profits from the sale of my house, I'd no doubt be similarly inclined to downplay his contribution.
Almost all of Lee's fans have for years asserted that Kirby did the lions share of the plotting and character creation. You could visit a very Lee friendly place like the Marvel Masterworks board and find ardent Lee fans who view Kirby with open scorn saying things like, "No one disputes Kirby did the bulk of the plotting." In fact the argument has always been not that Kirby didn't plot and create characters, but rather Kirby fans saying Lee didn't credit Kirby as a plotter and creator of characters, and Lee fans insisting that he was very generous in crediting the artists.
Dan posted the real reason Lee has withdrawn even the crumbs of credit he used to sweep off the table. Lee is paid one million dollars a year for life (along with many other benefits including sole ownership of "The Femizons"). In order to collect his one million Lee is forbidden from assisting in any way any challenge against Marvel's copyrights.
Also, Kirby and Ditko never had success to anywhere near the same degree as with the stuff they did with Stan. So what was the common denominator in that success? Stan, of course.
Even if, for the sake of discussion, we agree to allow for Stan's contribution being nothing more than dialoguing, it's quite clear that Stan's scripting was the magic ingredient that made Jack and Steve's work even better than it was.
It's often the case with secret or magic ingredients - it's one seemingly little thing that has a disproportionate effect on whatever it's applied to. In Marvel's case, that was Stan Lee.
Unfortunately, neither Jack or Steve could ever appreciate that Stan's seemingly minimum contribution (in their view) played a large part in the success of the titles they worked on.
Commercial success doesn't really have anything to do with this topic, and in my book means nothing.
Joe Kubert's Tarzan and the O'Neil Adams Green Lantern were bombs in the 70's, but far better comic books in my opinion than anything
Marvel published.
It's well known George Herriman's Krazy Kat was being carried in only a tiny number of papers during it's last decade. There were dozens of strips being carried in more newspapers. The awful Rod Stewart cover of "Downtown Train" outsold the Tom Waits original by a millions I'd guess. All through the 60's Lois Lane was crushing everything Marvel published.
Yes, Lee isn’t perfect, and yes, he took money for writing that he clearly didn’t do. That was one of things I highlighted in the post. As for Ditko leaving, nobody really knows why he left, other than Ditko, and he hasn’t really told anyone, definitively, as to why he left. There are stories that he left because of the writing issue, or because he wasn’t happy about the direction the Green Goblin story was taking, or that he wasn’t happy about having his art altered, or that he wasn’t happy with the credits. Perhaps it was one of those issues, or all of them, or perhaps it was none of them. One thing to note is that Ditko left and didn’t return to Marvel until Martin Goodman was gone – read into that what you will. However he did do work at Atlas/Seaboard, which was run by Goodman. But as to why he left? Your guess is as good as anyones.
However, no one can know for sure what he intended at the time he wrote it. He may well have meant to credit Steve with full and equal authorship when he signed it, with his later qualification of its meaning being a retroactive rationalisation once he realised the full implications of such an admission. I guess it's open to interpretation. Did he just mean Spider-Man the comicbook, or Spider-Man the character?
Certainly, as far as Spider-Man's first appearance goes, I don't see how anyone can deny Ditko credit as co-creator of the finished, published character.
However (and I'd have to look again at the documentary to be sure), MY impression was that Stan was laying claim to being sole creator of the 'concept' of Spider-Man - but that's where we can get bogged down in pedantry and semantics - trying to guess what people actually meant when they originally said it.
It's clear that, in the programme, Lee was understandably hedging his bets; he wanted to credit Ditko for his input, but not to the extent of gifting Sturdy Steve with ammunition for a claim against Marvel if he were so inclined.
Also, as I said, he was probably p*ssed off after years of everybody and his brother trying to rob him of credit for anything and everything, hence his guarded stance.
As for commercial success, it certainly meant something to DC. They hired Kirby because they bought into the myth that he was behind everything at Marvel and wanted to deprive them of the 'source' of it. (Little pun there.) They also wanted him to inject the same commercial success which Marvel seemed to be enjoying into titles of their own.
In the end 'though, we're measuring Kirby against himself. (If we ignore Lee for the moment.) Marvel were receiving critical and revived commercial success and DC wanted that. If they got Kirby they killed two birds with one stone; deprive Marvel of its golden goose (or so they thought), and have Kirby fans follow him over to DC in truckloads.
Neither of those things happened. Why? Kirby without Lee wasn't the force that either himself or DC imagined him to be. Which is not to say that what he produced at DC was bad - it just wasn't as good as what he did over at Marvel with Stan Lee's input.
As for the depositions – you’re wrong there. Disney had control over what they wanted the court to see to aid their case, Toberoff had the same right. In a court case each side can pick and choose what portions of the entire deposition that they want people to see. To imply that Disney did not allow Toberoff to use portions of the deposition is incorrect. The fact might be that Stan kept to his party line and Toberoff was left with virtually nothing to use. Stan’s deposition went over two days in total, and a lot of it was just repeating the same thing, over and over. That’s how it works. As for the lack of documents – again, as I’ve pointed out, we’re expecting people to retain documents and have a clear recall of events that happened over 50 years ago, events that were day to day then and fairly meaningless. I’m amazed that people remember as much as they do.
Yes, the Marvel lawyer approached Lee during the break – Toberoff has done the same thing in other cases (he was accused of ‘coaching’ in the Siegel v DC case) and Marvel/Disney put forward a good case to suggest that the Toberoff camp wrote large portions of the Evanier and Morrow declarations as they covered the same ground and were virtually word for word in cases. Quid pro quo.
Evanier and Morrow weren’t bumped because they have a Kirby bias – which clearly showed in their depositions – but because they have a lack of first hand knowledge – as the judge put it, they simply weren’t there at the time. If it were me I’d be calling the likes of Sinnott, Ayers and Goldberg over Morrow, Evanier, Steranko and Adams. The former were there, the latter were not. It also didn’t help that the Kirby children had no idea what Jack did and all pretty much contradicted each other – Neal Kirby had no idea who published Ant Man, but was convinced that Jack created it.
Personally I’d love for someone to call Ditko in to give a deposition. It’d be a hoot. As for the others, yes, Toberoff left it very late and ran out of time, but then he was going for a settlement. The case happened because Marvel/Disney clearly felt that he wanted too much, so they forced his hand.
Stan committing perjury…well we may never know. However we do know that Kirby also lied – read the footnote. Did Stan lie? I believe he has in the past; I’m not convinced that he lied on the stand this time around. Did Kirby lie? At times, the answer is yes, and, it would appear, openly.
C. C. Beck was the original artist on the project, but Simon had Kirby redraw Beck's pages because he wasn't entirely satisfied with them. (Sound familiar?)
Apart from the name, S & K's Spiderman bore little or no resemblance to Marvel's character anyway, so surely neither Simon nor Kirby could legitimately claim creator status under those circumstances?
Who was it said "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan"? He was sure right.
It was mainly a PR move by Disney anyhow, since the judge saw everything.
Marvel's page rates in 1964 were about half of what DC was paying according to John Romita. He's mentioned this in several different interviews.
Where did KIrby go on record saying he was making $250,000 in the late 60's? Kirby's page rate at the time was identical to what Adams, Steranko, Romita, and Buscema were making which was $75 per page. Kirby averaged about 60-65 pages a month during the second half of the 60's. So say 800 pages a year at $75 per page.
And I do agree Toberoff made a big mistake not bringing in Ayers, Goldberg, Sinnott, and particularly Ditko.
The appeal is alive, but Justia hasn't chosen to make it a featured case, and so the court records are only available through paid subscription services like PACER.
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2010cv00141/356975/34/
I wish people could get it into their mind that, to celebrate Jack, you don't have to tear down Stan.
Say all you want about Stan- he's never done that to anyone.
-Justin H.
Who are these people tearing down Stan Lee? It's Stan who has torn down Kirby from the very start by constantly denigrating Kirby's creative contribution by crediting Kirby as nothing but an artist. This reaches new heights in Lee's deposition. Some people may say they don't think Lee lied under oath in his deposition, and that's fine, but they should understand that if they accept the idea Stan was telling the truth, then they accept as fact Kirby was nothing but an artist. This is the Kirby who Stan's fans have been claiming for years was such a creative force that he needed Lee to reign him in, but as Stan tells it in his deposition Kirby created nothing except the artwork. Stan says ever character, every plot came from him
during the years 1958-1963. So if any of Stan's fans say Kirby brought Stan a character, or plot, remember you're tearing down Stan, because he's 100% clear it all started with him, and that Kirby was an illustrator.
And if anyone happens to see Stan please ask him, "Stan, Can you give me the name of one character Jack Kirby brought to you between the years 1958-1964?"
Considering the fact that the Surfer was clearly Stan's favourite Marvel character at one time, that's a pretty big admission.
And since Roz freely admitted to lying, and Jack's family were claiming ownership of just about every Marvel character going, is it any wonder if Stan's memory has suddenly become more selective?
What do you mean Stan's memory has become more selective? Are you saying he lied under oath?
Let's say Lee sued Kirby. How would he prove he wrote the stories? There weren't any scripts. Even if he produced the synopsis Roger Stern found in Stan's old desk in the early 70's how would Lee prove he wrote the synopsis prior to speaking with Kirby.
It's clear when Kirby said Lee never wrote anything he wasn't talking about the printed comic books, but rather the story Kirby gave to Stan, the one which often never made it into print as Kirby intended. Now it's true Kirby also said Lee got someone in the office to fill in the balloons. The thing is for all Kirby knew this was true. Lee didn't write in the office he wrote at home, and Kirby probably never saw Lee write anything. As John Romita put it, "I'd bet my house Jack never read the printed books."
Got to say though that Greg Theakston should be really proud of himself for publishing a quote, which we don't know the full context of, or even if it's accurate. And of course that supposed quote from Roz is now brought up constantly by people who think they have to tear down Jack to praise Stan.
We'll never know what happened really, but Jack didn't do everything, and neither did Stan. Distance, ego, company politics and moeny have made sure we'll never know for sure.
I was referring to how Stan interprets his written admission that Ditko was co-creator of Spider-Man. As there are different ways of interpreting that concession (he meant the character; he didn't mean the character, he meant the comicbook; he meant only in an honorary way, he meant full co-creatorship, etc., etc.), and as there is no way to know exactly what he meant when he signed it, he's not going to volunteer anything that will give anyone Marvel's head on a platter.
In his earliest interviews, Lee was extremely generous in giving credit to Kirby as both artist and writer, saying things like "He practically writes the stories himself. All I do is say let's have them fight Dr. Doom next issue." (Paraphrased, but pretty close to the actual quote.) Stan was always fulsome in his praise of those he worked with.
It was Kirby, etc., who tried to deny Stan his place in the scheme of things, not the other way around - at least at first. Most fans don't try and tear down one in order to build up the other; they're quite happy to accept "by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby".
However, there are a bunch of anti-Lee Kirby fans who are always trying to denigrate, diminish or deny Lee's entitlement to the credit which is rightfully his.
In short the consensus version is in the early days Lee and Kirby collaborated based on story conferences where the two men bounced ideas of each other. Both of them tend to think Kirby had more to do with the creation of the early characters than Stan, but they certainly don't insist it's a proven fact. During the mid and late 60's John and Mark both say the same thing the majority of Marvel fans have always said; that Kirby was in greater control of the plots only meeting with Stan on rare occasion. I've seen fierce advocates for Stan on the Timely Atlas list say many times they assume Kirby was responsible for 70% of the plotting.
I wouldn't dispute John and Mark like Kirby, but they seem to like Stan just as well. And John is publishing a book called Stan Lee Universe. I wonder what the reaction would be if he published a book called Jack Kirby Universe?
It doesn't add up calling Mark and John anti-Stan and pro-Kirby. Are the same people saying they are biased saying Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and John Romita have an anti-Kirby bias?
Timely-Atlas Guy