by Mark Evanier
Archie Publications
JACK SCHIFF SUED FOR breach of contract on Sky Masters. Kirby, getting questionable legal advice, thought he could convince a judge that he’d only signed the original contract under duress for fear of losing his work from DC. He was wrong about convincing the judge. The threats, if any, had not been explicit, and had been conveyed through Dave Wood, who didn’t dare cross his boss and back Kirby’s account. It also didn’t help that Kirby, with his wandering mind, faulty memory, and eccentric manner of speaking, was not a great witness. “Under oath, he couldn’t get his own name right,” Roz would remark.
So Kirby lost, and in many ways. He had to pay Schiff a modest sum the Kirby checkbook could ill afford and then keep paying Schiff commissions on Sky Masters, a strip that wasn’t taking in much by then and wasn’t long for the world. (It ended in February 1961.) Losing the suit also dashed any hopes Kirby might have had of getting back in at DC. Which meant he really had one and only one place to get work. “Shipwrecked at Marvel” was how he’d put it. There’d be a few miscellaneous other jobs—a story for Cracked, a few poor-paying jobs for the Classics Illustrated people—but for years to come and all through the sixties, Jack Kirby was stuck working for Martin Goodman’s company.
Which in turn prompted the perfect comment from Mike Sekowsky, one of DC’s star artists. Someone asked him years later who’d won the Schiff-Kirby lawsuit, and Sekowsky replied, “Stan Lee.”
STRANGE WORLDS
no. 1
December 1958
Art: Jack Kirby and Christopher Rule
Marvel Comics
SILVER SURFER
Private commission
1985
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Color: Tom Ziuko
FOUR
FACING FRONT
“There was no ‘Marvel’ age of comics. It was a Lee and Kirby age. No matter how much the tots in us admired other artists, other writers, the highest massif of the Marvel pinnacle was tenanted solely by that two-headed monster. It is arguable only by idiot deconstructionists or parvenus that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee not only worked way far outside the traditions of the envelope that was comics, they tore it to shreds. They recreated an entire universe. they set a tone, a path, a vision that hungry talents other than theirs perceived . . . and tracked. But Kirby, above all the others, was the Nostradamus. He painted that Sistine Chapel ceiling of funnybook environment with a brush and a palette of colors everyone else—to this day—emulates. No praise is too much.”
— HARLAN ELLISON, SCIENCE FICTION GRAND MASTER
MARTIN GOODMAN’S COMPANY went by dozens of different names—some sort of tax dodge, Kirby said—but the comic book line was mainly referred to as Atlas back then. His other, more profitable divisions put out puzzle books and magazines featuring hard-boiled fiction for males and/or racy cartoons and/or photos of naked women. Some felt he only kept the comics going so Stan Lee would have a job.
That job wasn’t much. Working with almost no staff or budget, Stan assembled approximately ten comics a month. One or two were westerns, two or three were “teen” comics (Millie the Model, to name one), one was usually a love comic, and the rest were an odd kind of science-fiction/monster comic that appealed to the same audience that had flocked to see Godzilla, King of the Monsters! at Saturday matinees.
Kirby drew for all but the teen comics, usually handling at least the cover and lead stories. The rest of the freelance pool consisted of Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, Paul Reinman, Jack Keller, Al Hartley, Vince Colletta, Stan Goldberg, and, occasionally, Gene Colan. Stan wrote most of the scripts, and what he couldn’t write he farmed out to his brother, Larry Lieber. Larry scripted many of the lead monster stories drawn by Kirby—stories like “Googam, Son of Goom” and “Fin Fang Foom!” “Fin Fang Foom!” was about a giant dragon dressed, for some reason, in a diaper.
In later years, Jack was of two minds about these stories. They were among the poorest-paying of his career, but he saw in them the clear antecedents of the Marvel Super Heroes. There was one story about a brute called the Thing, and several creatures named the Hulk. Beyond the names, there was an underlying sensibility: The “monsters” were not all monsters, the “good guys” were not 100 percent good, and the attainment of great power was not without its downside.
JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY
no. 62
November 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Marvel Comics
RAWHIDE KID
no. 17
August 1960
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
TWO-GUN KID
no. 56
October 1960
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
Sometimes the plots came from Stan, sometimes from Jack. When Stan and Jack did a story together, they had a new means of collaboration. It was born of necessity—Stan was overburdened with work—and to make use of Jack’s great skill with storylines. Stan later explained it as follows:
“I’d be writing a script for Ditko to draw. Jack would come in to drop off a job he’d finished and he’d want another script to start on. I’d tell him, ‘I can’t get you one now. I have to finish Ditko’s.’ But so that Jack wouldn’t leave empty-handed, we’d talk out a plot and I’d send him off to draw it. That way, he’d have work, and after he handed the pages in, I’d write the dialogue.”
Sometimes Stan would type up a written plot outline for the artist. Sometimes, not. Later, some of the artists (including Kirby and Ditko) would insist that Stan had contributed very little—sometimes nothing—to the plots of the comics. Since he received the total writing fee and (usually) the total writing credit, that would be a sore point in years to come.
But at the time, everyone was happy just to have work and the “Marvel Method,” as it would come to be known, produced some fine comics. Lee’s dialogue was witty and filled with character. Place it over exciting visual storytelling by Kirby or Ditko and you had something very special.
This was evident first on Rawhide Kid, a long-running western comic that Lee and Kirby revamped in 1960. They then did the same with Two-Gun Kid and whipped up a new strip about a sorcerer named Dr. Droom for Amazing Adventures. Sol Brodsky, who then worked part-time helping Stan with production, detailed their dilemma in a 1975 interview:
“Martin was too quick on the trigger to cancel a book. One slight dip in sales and it was gone. He sometimes didn’t think content mattered. He cancelled Two-Gun Kid before he received sales figures [on the Lee-Kirby revamp]. He didn’t believe what Stan and Jack had done to it would make much difference, but it did. Sales shot way up. He started looking for a place on the schedule to bring it back.”
That was assuming he kept publishing comics. No one was certain if he would, and at times he wasn’t so sure. In later years, Kirby and Brodsky both recalled Goodman actually packing it in at one point.
Jack told of walking into the offices one day around 1961 and finding Stan weeping. The comic line had been discontinued. “They were taking out the office furniture,” Kirby recalled on more than one occasion. “I told them to stop. I told Martin we could turn the company around if he’d just hang in there.” There is no doubt Jack honestly remembered it that way. Other sources suggest his memory was overstating the desperation, the better to improve on a good story.
But if Kirby was exaggerating, it was only by a little: Goodman had already come close to shutting down his comic book division with the cutbacks and buying freeze of May 1957. That downsizing had involved actual furniture removal as well as great interoffice emotion, and was probably the scene Jack was recalling. Business had improved a bit since then, but had never reached any stage of stability.
That Goodman kept at it had everything to do with the slow comeback of DC Comics. Even as Stan was allegedly weeping over a shutdown, DC was enjoying modest success with some super-hero revivals. One in particula
r—the super-team Justice League of America—seemed to suggest a coming trend.
That was all Goodman had to hear. Industry legend, sometimes recounted by Lee, holds that Martin learned of DC’s numbers from Jack Liebowitz during a golf date. Liebowitz, however, would later proclaim he never played golf with Goodman and insisted, “I’m sure I didn’t discuss anything with him about that, but everybody knew what the sales were.” Goodman sure did. He decided to postpone the return of Two-Gun Kid and instead directed Lee to come up with a super-hero team book.
And suddenly, way down at the end of the tunnel, there was light.
TALES TO ASTONISH
no. 34
August 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD
no. 28
February—March 1960
Art: Mike Sekowsky and Murphy Anderson
DC Comics
SO ONE DAY, STAN LEE called in Jack Kirby, and between them the first issue of Fantastic Four came to be. It wasn’t polished or even all that coherent. But somewhere in there, there was a sense of beginning.
The origin story that Stan and Jack crafted detailed the story of four adventurers—Professor Reed Richards, Sue Storm, her younger brother Johnny Storm, and test pilot Ben Grimm. Launched into space as part of an experiment, they underwent incredible transformations when their craft was bombarded by cosmic rays. Cosmic rays and all forms of radiation, in those days of atom bomb testing and scares, would prove to be an all-purpose, one-size-fits-all origin device for any comic scripted by Stan Lee.
Returning hastily to Earth, the four discovered their new abilities: Richards could stretch, much in the manner of the classic super hero Plastic Man. This afforded the scientist a physical power in striking contrast to his sedate, intellectual personality. He called himself Mr. Fantastic, though in keeping with a coming dynamic that would emphasize character over gimmick, he would more often be called by his real name. Similarly, his fiancée Sue Storm, who received the power to disappear, would be more often addressed as Sue than as the Invisible Girl.
Her brother, Johnny Storm, could burst into flame, fly, and hurl fireballs. Perhaps inspired by how DC was updating its defunct super heroes of the forties, Lee and Kirby had resurrected and remodeled the Human Torch. Whereas the version created by Carl Burgos had been an android, the new incarnation was a young man whose personality was “hot-headed,” as per his newfound powers.
But the hands-down scene-stealer of the group was Ben Grimm, cursed by the radiation to become a misshapen being with a reptilian epidermis and awesome strength—the Thing. The character had his lineage in the monster comics that Jack was still drawing at the time, but Jack saw another point of origin: himself.
Above and following pages
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 1
November 1961
Art: Jack Kirby and George Klein
Marvel Comics
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 5
July 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Marvel Comics
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 7
October 1962
Art: Jack Kirby
Marvel Comics
Though Kirby identified with the character of the Thing, friends have noticed the uncanny resemblance on this cover between Mr. Fantastic and Jack himself . . . all the more intriguing because this was the only Fantastic Four cover Jack ever inked. Therefore, that’s exactly how he intended the character to look.
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 10
January 1963
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
Stan and Jack become characters in their own comic . . . hiding their faces as they encountered their master villain who always hid his own face.
FANTASTIC FOUR
Unpublished cover intended for no. 20
November 1963
Art: Jack Kirby
This one got as far as Stan Lee writing in the cover copy by hand.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
no. 1
May 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman
Marvel Comics
TALES TO ASTONISH
no. 35
September 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
“If you’ll notice the way the Thing talks and acts, you’ll find that the Thing is really Jack Kirby,” Jack once explained. “He has my manners, he has my manner of speech, and he thinks the way I do. He’s excitable, and you’ll find that he’s very, very active among people, and he can muscle his way through a crowd. I find I’m that sort of person.”
There would later be disagreement over the sequence of events that brought forth the new heroes. Lee would say he figured out the story and characters, typed up a plot outline (which still exists), selected Jack to draw it, and handed him the basics of the first issue. Kirby would say that wasn’t how they ever worked—that even on short, unimportant romance stories, there’d be a plot conference, and then he’d be sent off to pencil pages as he saw fit, with or without a typed plot. He’d say he came up with the characters and even point to how similar the origin was to Challengers of the Unknown.
Among those who worked around them at the time, there was a unanimous view: that Fantastic Four was created by Stan and Jack. No further division of credit seemed appropriate. Not on that, not on all the wonderment yet to come.
None of this mattered when the first issue reached newsstands on August 8, 1961. Creatively, it triggered a revolution in comic book storytelling, particularly in the areas of heroic fantasy. Financially, it began the ascent of Marvel—as the company would come to be known—from a tiny publisher to a massive, multimedia corporation and industry leader. More so than any release since Action Comics no. 1, Fantastic Four no. 1 changed the rules of the game.
The underpinnings of Fantastic Four may have resembled Challengers of the Unknown, but the new book was revolutionary in ways that Challengers was not. The FF characters—especially Ben Grimm, “The Thing”—had uncommon depth and personality, if not in their first issue then certainly as the book began to find its way. Even if Stan’s previous work had not suggested a flair for interesting, ongoing characters, his subsequent efforts, apart from Kirby, certainly would.
IT WAS THE SAME way with the next new comic they launched, though its success was not as immediately evident. Again, both Lee and Kirby would claim to have come up with the idea for The Incredible Hulk, though both cited Jekyll and Hyde as inspiration, as well as the Frankenstein book and movies.
The Hulk was a bridge between the monster comics Marvel had been producing and the super-hero books that were about to displace them. Perhaps that was why initial sales were disappointing. Still, there was something irresistible about the creature, gray-skinned in his first issue; green, thereafter. He was powerful and destructive but he was also more human than a lot of nonmonsters who’d inhabited comic books. Goodman would cancel the book after six issues, but the readers wouldn’t let this one go.
Goodman was, however, warming to the notion that super heroes might be his best wager. He had five ongoing monster/science-fiction anthology titles: Journey into Mystery, Amazing Adult Fantasy, Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, and Tales of Suspense. He gave the nod to adding super-hero strips to the front of each. A smart move.
And so the Mighty Thor debuted in Journey into Mystery. Larry Lieber did the initial script, but the concept and plot, Stan said, came from him. Jack would later point to all the stories he’d done about gods (Thor, chief among them) walking the earth, and insist the series had originated with him.
Whoever’s idea it was, it was a good one—a new and fertile kind of super-hero franchise: gods, good and bad, warring with our planet as the battleground. It was a perfect way to bring forth an endless stream of intriguing, powerful characters without pausing for a contr
ived origin. Once you bought the Lee-Kirby spin on Norse legends, you were in. Their version of the God of Thunder had all the attributes of Captain Marvel, right down to the transformation in a bolt of lightning.
Later, when stories veered back toward Asgard, Jack would do some of his most striking ad-lib costume design and architectural rendering. Like so much of what he drew, it wasn’t deeply researched or logical, but it was drawn with such conviction and originality, few quibbled. You thought, Sure, that’s what Odin and his throne room must look like. As Chic Stone, who inked some of Jack’s best work on the strip, remarked, “Kirby could just lead you through all these different worlds. The readers would follow him anywhere.”
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
Gift to the author
1984
Art: Jack Kirby
Above and following pages
JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY
no. 83
August 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Marvel Comics
AMAZING FANTASY
no. 15
August 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Color: Stan Goldberg
Marvel Comics
THE SAME MONTH THOR debuted, a super hero was added to the book that had been known as Amazing Adult Fantasy. He was an unusual creation whose convoluted birthing process would cause considerable friction between Lee and Kirby. Both would forever claim to have come up with the idea for what would prove to be Marvel’s most successful character ever—the Amazing Spider-Man.
In later years, Stan recalled that in his search for new characters, his mind had drifted back to an old pulp hero: “I’d always loved the Spider. I also loved the name Hawkman, but of course DC had a character by that name. But thinking about Hawkman led me to Spider-Man. The minute I said it out loud—‘Spider-Man’—I knew we had to do it.”
Jack, however, maintained that he’d suggested the idea; that Spiderman (no hyphen) was an idea he’d once developed with Joe Simon . . . and he even had an old title logo design by Simon to prove it.