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Now, in my continuing commentary on Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, published by Harry N. Abrams, I arrive at the peak of Jack Kirby’s career: the 1960s, in the Silver Age of Comics, when Kirby collaborated with Stan Lee in creating the Fantastic Four and so many of the other classic characters of the Marvel Universe. As Mark Evanier reminds us in this book, Lee and Kirby launched a “revolution” in heroic fantasy comics with Fantastic Four #1, which he rightly says “changed the rules” more than any comic book since Action Comics #1, in which the superhero genre was born (Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics, p. 122). Fantastic Four #1 marked a true renaissance of this genre, which has not only thrived ever since in comics, but found new popularity in film and television.

But this is also the period in Kirby’s career that stirs the most controversy. As Evanier explains, Marvel’s editor and principal writer, Stan Lee, collaborated with Kirby and other artists in what was then an unusual way. Burdened with the duty to write so many comics, Lee devised the “Marvel method” to draw upon the considerable talents of artists like Kirby and Steve Ditko to create story ideas. Typically, Lee and Kirby would hold a conference to devise the basic plot of a story, then Kirby would draw the story, elaborating upon and adding to that plot, and then Lee would script the dialogue and captions.

But what actually happened during those plot conferences? What elements of the plots were Lee’s and which were Kirby’s? Which man first conceived of which of the scores of characters who emerged at Marvel during this amazing period of creativity?

In his book Mark Evanier carefully attempts to be fair to both Lee and Kirby in treading through this mine field. At one point Evanier sagely assets that “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, nor on all the wonderment to come” (Evanier, p. 122). That strikes me as correct. It is the combination of Lee and Kirby’s individual talents, the synthesis of the words and the pictures, that made these characters and series so successful, both commercially and creatively. We have seen plenty of work that Stan Lee has done with other artists, and entire series that Jack Kirby both wrote and drew himself. It’s hard for me to imagine that a Fantastic Four by either man without the other could have achieved the heights they reached in that series together.

Yet in the 1960s and 1970s Kirby’s role in co-plotting–and in some cases, entirely plotting–his collaborations with Stan Lee was known to very few. (As a Marvel reader during those years, I was certainly unaware of it.) Kirby understandably felt unjustly deprived of both his rightful credit for co-creating a stable of such commercially valuable characters and the financial rewards that should in a more just world have been his.

So the question of who did what did become an issue. As Evanier recounts, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby each claimed to be the one who first came up with the idea for the Incredible Hulk. Lee asserted that he originated the idea of doing a series about the Norse god Thor as a superhero; Kirby contended that it was his own idea. Lee says he first conceived of the X-Men; Kirby contended that the credit belonged to him instead. And so it goes. Lee and Kirby each had notoriously bad memories, and they were trying to remember who came up with which idea decades ago.

And there are no witnesses and no physical evidence to settle the disputes. Nobody made records of the plotting sessions at the time. That suggests that, at the time, nobody thought it was important to do so. After all, back then there was little money in comics and no prestige, and no one could have anticipated that Marvel would grow into a multimillion dollar media empire.

Reading this section of Evanier’s book set me wondering about many aspects of this controversy. Is it possible that in the early 1960s not even Kirby or Ditko fretted about getting more credit or compensation for their work with Lee? Evanier states that it was “later” that Kirby and Ditko would claim that Lee contributed little or nothing to the plots. “Since he received the total writing fee and (usually) the total writing credit, that would be a sore point in years to come” (Evanier, p. 112).

Did Kirby, Ditko and the other artists ever confront Lee about this? If they did, how did he respond to their arguments? Or did they just stew in silence, believing that Lee should have known enough to give them money and credit for writing without their asking him? Ditko eventually was billed as sole plotter on his later Amazing Spider-Man work. Why did Ditko get credit when Kirby did not?

What was Stan Lee’s position at the time? Lee has always praised Kirby and Ditko as artists, and certainly in recent years he has acknowledged their plot contributions to his collaborations with them. When Lee and Kirby co-plotted as a story, did Lee assume that Kirby’s fee covered both drawing and co-plotting, and that his own covered co-plotting and scripting? Was Lee somehow blind to the reasons for Kirby’s growing resentment? Or, again, did the subject never come up at the time? Evanier suggests that was the case, writing that “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” (Evanier, p. 112).

Surely if Lee and Kirby had realized at the time there would have been such a mess over who did what, they would have tape recorded their plotting sessions or had someone transcribe them!

(I know what this is like. Looking back at entries for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in the 1980s, I sometimes find myself wondering if I wrote the entry or the series’ editor and creator Mark Gruenwald did. Mark probably kept records, but where are they now? Complicating the problem is the fact that I often revised and expanded entries that Mark had originally written. But how can one tell twenty years later which sections of an entry are Mark’s and which are mine?)

Indeed, no one kept proper records of what one day would be regarded as significant history. Evanier recounts the “industry legend” that Marvel publisher Martin Goodman learned about the sales of Justice League of America from DC’s Jack Liebowitz during a golf game, but Evanier then points out that Liebowitz denied he ever played golf with Goodman.

In any event, Goodman instructed Stan Lee to start a new superhero book to compete with DC’s Justice League, and Fantastic Four #1 was the result.

I was surprised that Evanier claims that the FF discovered their new super-powers on the moon in their first issue (Evanier p. 114), though he has corrected the mistake at his website. Once their spaceship was hit by the unexpectedly intense radiation, they turned back and returned to Earth, where their powers first manifested. Furthermore, it’s a common error that in their origin story the FF were heading to the moon. The story actually states they were journeying “to the stars”; hence, the real-life moon landing in 1969 hasn’t dated the origin story.

The most revolutionary creation among the members of the Fantastic Four was Ben Grimm, the Thing: the monster depicted as semi-tragic hero. I had assumed that Kirby and Ben Grimm’s personalities had much in common, but Evanier quotes Kirby spelling it out: “the Thing is really Jack Kirby. . . .He has my manners, he has my manner of speech, and he thinks the way I do” (Evanier, p. 122).

But wait! Even if Kirby made notes in the borders of the original art pages, suggesting what the Thing was saying, it was Stan Lee who wrote the Thing’s dialogue. As Evanier points out, sometimes Lee followed Kirby’s border notes and other times he didn’t. Certainly Lee reworked Kirby’s suggested dialogue, and as Evanier acknowledges, Lee is superb at depicting characterization through dialogue.

So is the Thing really purely an expression of Jack Kirby? Did Stan Lee think that in scripting the Thing, he was portraying a version of Kirby? Or is it more likely that the Thing we see in the Lee-Kirby FF issues expresses parts of both creators’ personalities?

The biggest puzzle is who came up with the idea for Spider-Man. Evanier reports that Stan Lee claims that, inspired by the pulp vigilante called the Spider, he came up with the idea to do a character called Spider-Man. Kirby claimed that he and Joe Simon had devised the name Spider-Man (or “Spiderman” minus the hyphen), and that he–Kirby–suggested doing a character by that name at Marvel.

Evanier notes that Simon contends that his “Spider-Man” was a different name he had devised for his character the Silver Spider, but that Kirby had nothing to do with its creation. Simon and Kirby had reworked the Silver Spider into the Fly, an orphan boy who used a magic ring to transform into an insect-themed adult superhero, for Archie Comics.

So Kirby began drawing the first Spider-Man story for Marvel, in which the title character was a young boy who used a magic ring to transform into a spider-themed adult superhero. After he’d finished the first few pages, Lee decided to reassign the story to Steve Ditko. Lee has long claimed that Kirby made Spider-Man look too muscular and traditionally heroic. Evanier casts doubt on this story, pointing out that Kirby could easily have redrawn the few pages to make Spider-Man look less muscular, and that, after all, Kirby drew Spider-Man on the cover for Amazing Fantasy #15, his first appearance (Evanier p. 126).

This is true, but I wonder if Stan Lee’s explanation still points to the real reason for the change in artists, even if it wasn’t perfectly phrased. I’ve heard John Romita, Sr. say that when he took over drawing Spider-Man from Steve Ditko, he initially attempted to draw Spider-Man in a Ditkoesque style, but proved unsuccessful at it; instead, Romita followed his natural tendencies as an artist and made Peter Parker/Spider-Man a much more handsome figure than the one Ditko had drawn, and Stan Lee went along with this. Lee may well have recognized that Kirby’s natural tendency was to draw superheroes with heroic builds, and that whatever their original intentions, a Lee-Kirby Spider-Man would inevitably evolve away from the concept of a normal-looking guy with super-powers. Even on Kirby’s Amazing Fantasy #15 cover, Spider-Man looked more massive and conventionally heroic than the typical version drawn by Ditko.

Besides, the difference between Kirby and Ditko doesn’t just lie in how muscular they make their superheroes look. Kirby and Ditko portray very different visions of the world. Think of Jack Kirby’s superhero art, and you imagine godlike heroes in spectacular action scenes set against fantastic landscapes. On the other hand, Steve Ditko’s strength is in depicting ordinary-looking people in mundane, everyday settings (or else sorcerers in hallucinatory, surrealistic environments, but that’s another series). By saying that “Jack could never draw Spider-Man the way I wanted him to look” (Evanier p. 127), maybe Stan Lee was referring not just to the way Kirby drew Spider-Man the character, but the way that he drew the entire environment of the Spider-Man series–the supporting cast, the neighborhoods,

Moreover, it wasn’t just that Lee changed the way Spider-Man was drawn; he also tossed out the original concept of who Spider-Man was. In the revised origin story that Ditko drew, Spider-Man was no longer a small boy but a high school student, there was no magic ring, and he did not transform into an adult but was an adolescent superhero.

Evanier convincingly argues that the Spider-Man concept was radically revised in order to make the character different from the Fly. That would also provide another reason for taking Kirby off the series, since Kirby had drawn the Fly. As Evanier states, Marvel would have wanted to avoid a lawsuit from Archie.

Furthermore, was it fair to Joe Simon for Kirby to be recycling elements of The Silver Spider into Marvel’s new Spider-Man series? I’m going to assume that Kirby had no bad intentions in this case. Rather, I wonder if this recycling is simply a sign that in 1961 and 1962, comics professionals simply didn’t care as much about issues of originality and credit as they would later on. There wasn’t that much money in comics back then, and comics writers and artists rarely got their names on a story; Stan Lee pioneered regularly giving writers (including himself, of course), artists, and even letterers credits.

Moreover, for decades Lee has stated that in 1961 he was frustrated with comics and was ready to quit, but his wife urged him to start writing comics he would want to read himself; that suggestion inspired the Marvel revolution. It’s clear from looking at these early Silver Age Marvel stories that Stan Lee was consciously breaking new ground. He must have taken pride in this radical new direction he and his collaborators were setting for the superhero genre. As Evanier notes, it was Ditko who informed Lee about the resemblances between the Kirby version of Spider-Man and the Fly. I wonder if it was a matter of pride for Lee, now that he was attempting to raise the level of the superhero genre, not to be seen as imitating another comics character.

Or was it that, once he had embarked on the process of creating a new kid superhero, Lee began to envision ways of making him as different as the Fantastic Four were from previous superhero teams. As Evanier points out, the original version if Spider-Man also resembles the original Captain Marvel–a little boy who magically turns into a superhero. Isn’t it possible that once Lee saw Kirby’s first few pages, he realized he wanted to go in a different, more realistic direction, one for which Ditko’s grittier, quirkier art style would be more appropriate?

The Lee-Ditko Spider-Man is older than the previous Lee-Kirby version, has a different costume, and has nothing to do with magic (at least not until J,. Michael Straczynski recently established that Spider-Man draws his power from the “spider-totem”!). Evanier reports that Kirby “felt he’d at least contributed something” to Spider-Man’s creation, “for which he received neither pay nor acknowledgment” (Evanier p. 128). But the two versions are so different that I wonder if it’s credible to claim Kirby was one of Spider-Man’s co-creators. Rather, it seems that Kirby contributed to a proposed “Spider-Man” character that Lee ended up rejecting. Even if it was Kirby who proposed the “Spider-Man” name, that was based on Joe Simon’s Silver Spider. And certainly one thing that Marvel has shown is that there is a lot more to a superhero character than his name.

Evanier reveals that Kirby disliked another early Marvel super hero, Ant-Man, asserting that “No one fantasizes about being the size of an ant” (Evanier p. 128). “Years later,” Evanier goes on, “Jack would be both incensed and amused by a scholarly article that suggested that because he was not tall, the Marvel hero with whom he most closely identified had to be Ant-Man” (Evanier p. 128). I fear that as comics increasingly receive academic and critical attention, we’re going to see many more cases of scholars and reviewers making these sorts of unfounded assumptions. A proper critic would probably steer clear of committing the “intentional fallacy” in any event. But now asserting that people will doubtless speculate that Kirby hated being short and that’s why he so disdained Ant-Man–and joined with Stan in turning him into Giant-Man, as if overcompensating!

The character with whom Kirby did identify strongly was Nick Fury, saying that the invincible war hero turned superspy “Nick Fury is how I wish others saw me. Ben Grimm [The Thing] is probably closer to the way they do see me” (Evanier p.131). Does that mean Kirby thought others regarded him as bad-tempered? Or comical? Or monstrous? And again, did Stan Lee think of Nick Fury as an avatar of Jack Kirby? Or did Stan put some of his own personality into Fury? And did Jim Steranko think of Fury as an idealized Kirby surrogate when he took over the Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD series?

You might think that today’s comics pros might have already figured out that Fury has a lot in common with Kirby. But considering that Marvel’s Ultimates line depicts Nick Fury as a lookalike for Samuel L. Jackson, perhaps not. Think of Fury as Kirby’s idealized self-portrait, and Fury’s use of profanity in Marvel’s MAX line becomes even more offensive. But the writers who really don’t get it are the ones who, over the decades, insist on portraying Fury as a Machiavellian spymaster, defending an authoritarian reestablishment. What does this have to do with Jack Kirby’s idealized self-portrait? Or with the running theme of Kirby’s career, in which he struggled against corporate power rather than aligning himself with it?

Evanier describes how Kirby participated in the creation of Iron Man: even though it was Don Heck who drew the original story, Heck was following “some concept sketches” and a cover that Kirby had done. To my surprise, Kirby even had a hand in the genesis of Daredevil, apparently contributing plot ideas to Daredevil’s early issues and even coming up with the design for his billy club. Kirby drew the first Daredevil covers: does that mean he designed DD’s original yellow-and-black costume? “Often, on a comic where he did not do the interiors,” Evanier states, “he’d draw the cover and, in so doing, design a villain or other new character who’d appear within” (Evanier p. 133). Is there any way at this point of compiling a list of how many Silver Age Marvel characters Kirby thus designed, whom comics historians have presumably been crediting to other artists instead?

How much compensation did Kirby get for this helping to create characters in series and stories that he did not draw? It doesn’t appear that anyone at Marvel kept official records of Kirby’s contributions to creating characters in such circumstances. Again, it seems that in the early 1960s, before anyone realized that someday this would be of historical and financial importance, there was a much more lax attitude about apportioning credit for creating characters and series or contributing to plots. No one was getting royalties in comics back then, and it was assumed that the companies owned everything. Why would Kirby design characters for series he did not draw, and got no credit for, even a lead character like Iron Man, unless he thought at the time that it wasn’t a matter of importance?

Perhaps Kirby’s dissatisfaction with the status quo grew as Marvel became more successful and the commercial value of the characters grew considerably. Evanier writes that “Almost nothing about Jack’s working relationship with Marvel was on paper–not even, at the time, any delineation of what rights he had or was giving up to the material. Jack didn’t much like that, but he didn’t see an alternative” (Evanier p. 136).

Evanier doesn’t think much of Lee and Kirby’s revelation in Avengers #4 that Captain America had been in suspended animation, frozen within a block of ice, since the end of World War II: “The science was ridiculous,” complains Evanier, adding that “Stan and Jack would each later blame the other for it” (Evanier p. 131). But regardless of its scientific validity, Lee and Kirby concocted a brilliant image: Captain America as the blonde sun god, trapped in the realm of winter (and symbolically death), until he is resurrected by the warm waters of life. This may not make sense in terms of science, but it makes perfect sense in the metaphorical language of myth, and that is far more important to the superior genre.

Evanier disputes the familiar notion that Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” in Fantastic Four #48-50 was founded on the premise of the FF fighting God: “it’s hard to see how Galactus, who consumed life instead of creating it, resembled either’s notion of the Almighty” (Evanier p. 138).

But Lee and Kirby had already done stories about evil “gods,” notably Loki in Thor. Kirby would go on to create The New Gods and his other “Fourth World” series at DC, in which the most memorable figure is Darkseid, the evil god who rules the hellish planet Apokolips and seeks the “anti-life formula.” in the 1970s Kirby returned to Marvel and created The Eternals, which featured the “space gods” known as the Celestials who might annihilate the Earth in fifty years for reasons that are utterly inscrutable to humanity. Lee and Kirby may have believed in a more benign God, but that doesn’t mean they could not imagine a malevolent or destructive deity.

Moreover, as I’ve argued in my column here (see “Comics in Context” #184: “Clobbered Again”) and here (“Comics in Context” #185: “Get Off of My Cloud”), the Galactus trilogy can be read as dealing with three different aspects of God. Galactus is the God of Wrath, who has sentenced all living beings to inevitable death, and who cares nothing for inferior beings like humans. Uatu the Watcher is a benevolent, fatherly God, who nevertheless ordinarily refrains from intervening in human affairs, preferring to help mortals to succeeded through their own efforts. Then there’s the Silver Surfer, who, whether or not Lee and Kirby consciously intended it, acts as a Christ figure, sacrificing himself to save humanity. Ultimately the good aspect of God–the Watcher–makes it possible for humanity–Reed Richards–to assert their right to exist, overcoming the destructive aspect of God.

Evanier contends that Kirby thought of Galactus as a metaphor for “corporate raiders” who would “drain” a company of “its assets, and move on, “leaving a hollow, inert shell” (Evanier p. 138). Might Kirby have subconsciously expressing a fear that Marvel or the comics industry in general was draining his own creativity, leaving him a “hollow shell” without either credit or sufficient compensation? Indeed, Evanier reports that Kirby was concerned about his own health, and was seeking “health insurance and maybe a pension” from Marvel at this time, but in vain (Evanier p. 138).

Stan Lee has repeatedly acknowledged that when he received the original art pages for Fantastic Four #48, he was surprised to see the Surfer for the first time. He and Kirby had not discussed the Surfer beforehand; Kirby got the idea to give Galactus a herald and inserted him into the story. So now the Silver Surfer is generally regarded as having been created solely by Kirby.

But is that quite right? In the BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (see “Comics in Context” #208: “Creative Differences”), Stan Lee explains that since he came up with the idea for a superhero called Spider-Man, then he should be acknowledged as the character’s sole creator. For the sake of argument, let’s assume here that Lee’s memory is correct and he did originate the idea. But comics is a visual medium. and Ditko devised the visual aspect of Spider-Man. Shouldn’t Ditko then be credited as Spider-Man’s co-creator?

Now let’s apply a similar argument to the Silver Surfer. Kirby introduced the character into Fantastic Four #48, designed his visual appearance, and gave him the role of Galactus’s herald: Kirby plotted the Surfer’s role in the first comic in which he appeared. But the Galactus trilogy is a three-part story. Once Kirby had introduced the Surfer, did Stan Lee co-plot the Surfer’s scenes in FF #49 and 50, including his meeting with Alicia Masters and his rebellion against Galactus, both of which defined the Surfer’s characterization? Does anyone know? Even if we assume that Kirby is solely responsible for plotting the Surfer sequences throughout the entire Galactus trilogy (And why should we?) and did border notes suggesting what the Surfer was talking about, it is still Stan Lee who wrote the Surfer’s dialogue throughout the Galactus trilogy. And one of Stan Lee’s greatest talents is the ability to delineate characterization through dialogue. Lee is ultimately responsible for creating the way in which the Silver Surfer speaks, and in defining his personality through that dialogue, in his initial appearances. Doesn’t Lee therefore merit credit as the Surfer’s co-creator? If Kirby created the pictures, Lee created the words.

Evanier draws a distinction between Kirby’s vision of the Surfer as a truly alien being, to whom human emotions are new concepts, and the origin that Lee gave him–without Kirby’s participation–in Silver Surfer #1 (August 1968) as a being who had once been a man like ourselves, but had vowed to serve Galactus in order to save his home world and the woman he loved. “That may have been the Surfer that Stan had been writing,” comments Evanier, “but it wasn’t the one that Jack had been drawing” (Evanier p. 141). That’s an interesting way to phrase it. It suggests that Lee and Kirby were indeed co-creators of the Surfer as he had appeared in previous stories in Fantastic Four, with Lee endowing the Surfer with a personality that contradicted Kirby’s intentions for the character. Since Lee was in charge, his interpretation of the Surfer’s personality won out. (Was Lee even aware that Kirby interpreted the Surfer differently? Had they discussed the subject? I’ve seen Lee recently say that Kirby considered the Surfer a “throwaway” character, and that he therefore adopted him. So it seems that even nowadays Lee is unaware of what the Surfer meant to Kirby.)

The Surfer’s origin was perhaps the most blatant case of Lee overruling Kirby’s intentions for a character or story. By the end of the 1960s, Evanier states, Kirby was completely plotting the stories he did with Lee, but “Sometimes Stan would deviate wildly from what Jack had intended. . . . [Kirby] loved the stories he developed. and would often feel that Stan’s word balloons stripped some issue of its meaning or inverted a key concept” (Evanier p. 147). It’s easy to see why Kirby would feel frustrated by this. He had obviously reached the point at which it was necessary for him to break off his collaboration with Lee and, if he could find the opportunity, either write his own stories or find a scripter who would more closely follow his ideas.

But I find myself sympathizing with Lee, as well. He was not only the credited writer but also the editor, the boss responsible for the entire Marvel line of comics. I imagine that Lee regarded his role as not simply to follow Kirby’s instructions in the border notes, but to mold the material in ways that he felt would make it better and more appealing to readers. Lee and Kirby weren’t equals in their collaborations in terms of their roles at Marvel: Lee was the editor, so that meant he had the final word.

Marvel recently published Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure #1, containing one of the final FF stories that Kirby drew, which Marvel had not previously published in complete form. The original artwork is reproduced with Kirby’s border notes; then you can read the “restored” version of the story with new dialogue by Stan Lee. And you can see for yourselves that Lee’s scripting consistently improves upon Kirby’s suggestions in the borders.

By the late 1960s Marvel was making money from merchandising superheroes that Kirby had co-created, putting his artwork on toys and such, there was a Fantastic Four TV show in 1967, and the year before there was a Marvel Super Heroes television series that reproduced Kirby artwork on screen. But Kirby wasn’t seeing any money from any of this.

Evanier reports that around this time Kirby learned that Bob Kane, the officially credited creator of Batman, had just made a “million dollar deal” with DC, but that DC had just fired a number of its veteran writers, including Bill Finger, who had written most of the early Batman stories and conceived most of the character’s basic mythos (see “Comics in Context” #94: “Back to Brigadoon”). “The lesson was not lost on Kirby,” Evanier writes: “Bob Kane, who’d been recognized as the creator of a successful property, had gotten rich. Bill Finger, who hadn’t, had gotten fired” (Evanier p. 150)

But was that the real lesson? Wasn’t it not just that Kane was recognized as Batman’s creator, but that DC wanted to make sure that Kane didn’t claim ownership of the copyright on Batman and take this valuable property away from them? Having been employed by Kane to write Batman, Finger presumably couldn’t pose that kind if threat to DC, so the DC Comics administration of that period obviously felt they could get away with treating Finger like dirt.

Did Kirby have any legal claim on the Marvel characters he co-created? Apparently Marvel didn’t think so back in the 1960s. Kirby kept hoping that Marvel would give him a better deal out of a simple sense of fairness. But the corporate mindset doesn’t believe in giving money better deals unless its forced to do so. Evanier writes that “All he [Kirby] wanted was a little more money, some kind of long-term financial security for himself and his family and an official acknowledgment of his status as co-creator” (Evanier p. 153). These are miniscule prices to pay for everything that Kirby had done for Marvel in the 1960s.

But Marvel’s new corporate owners saw no reason to pay for what they already possessed. Rewarding loyalty isn’t a reason that made sense to them. Unlike Kane, Kirby had no leverage, or did not think he did. All that Kirby could do is threaten to quit, depriving the company of his talents.

But, according to Evanier, Marvel’s new owners in 1970 believed that Stan Lee, presumably since he was the writer and editor, generated all the creative ideas at Marvel, and that the artists were interchangeable and simply implemented Lee’s ideas. Marvel had gone corporate, and the new bureaucrats were characteristically willfully blind to any reality that conflicted with their preconceptions. They apparently neither knew about the “Marvel method” of creating characters and stories, nor cared to find out, nor felt any need to learn enough about the comics business to discover why Jack Kirby was an irreplaceable creative resource. Back in 1970 it’s likely none of them considered comics to be anything more than crap to sell to kids. Marvel’s owners did not feel threatened whatsoever by the prospect of Jack Kirby quitting.

And so in 1970 Kirby did quit rather than suffer further mistreatment. He went to DC, where he created a masterwork, his “Fourth World.” But beyond that lay an astonishing downturn in his career, as we shall see next time.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of copyright challenges, as I was above: shortly after I finished writing this installment of my column, I discovered this March 29, 2008 article in The New York Times revealing that the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel–including his widow Joanne, the model for Lois Lane–has just been granted partial ownership of the character by a federal court. Well, well, well. I didn’t realize just how formidable Lois Lane can be. . . . .

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

Here’s a new feature that I should have thought of long ago. From now on, I’m going to supply links to Amazon for any books or DVDs that I review in my column. Here’s where you can go to order a copy of Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics for only $26.40, discounted from the list price of $40 (CLICK HERE TO ORDER).

Not only that, but I’m going to start rotating links to my own books at Amazon. com. The proper place to begin is with my most recent book, The Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City from Simon and Schuster (CLICK HERE TO ORDER). This is a handbook to the real, fictional, and fictionalized locations in stories throughout Marvel history: everything from the United Nations complex (site of appearances by Magneto and the Sub-Mariner) to the Daily Bugle building (both the comics and the movie versions, which are in very different sections of town!). If you’re a Marvel fan and you’ll be visiting New York City, this book will serve as your guide both to the Manhattan of real life and the Manhattan of the imagination, where superheroes swing high among the skyscrapers.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Just before Christmas I began my extended commentary on Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, his eagerly awaited book that serves as both a biography of Jack Kirby, the greatest adventure and fantasy artist in 20th century American comic books, and as an art book showcasing his work (see “Comics in Context” #207: “Royal Retrospective”), Right after New Year’s I did another installment of this column about the Kirby book, though half of it was actually about the BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (see “Comics in Context” #208: “Creative Differences”). Then I agreed to postpone the rest of my commentary until Harry N. Abrams published the book in late February.

In the meantime I’ve devoted this column to other worthy subjects, such as Bob Clampett (“Comics in Context” #213), Steve Gerber (#214, 215 and 216), Darwyn Cooke (#217), Stephen Sondheim, of all people (#218), and Mephisto’s marriage counseling (#210). But now it’s March, Kirby: King of Comics is in stores, and I’ve received to go-ahead to resume what I consider not so much a review as my series of critical annotations on this landmark book.

Those of you who have read my contribution to the Beat’s annual survey this year know that I am interested in seeing how much coverage Kirby: King of Comics receives in the mainstream media. This would be a useful sign of just how wide and deep the mainstream culture’s new interest in the comics medium actually is.

So far I haven’t found much. But on Sunday March 23 The Washington Post ran a review by novelist Glen David Gold, a Kirby admirer who had already written about him in the catalogue for the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition (see “Comics in Context” #155: “Two American Masters”).

In his review Gold refers to David Michaelis’s recent biography Schulz and Peanuts that portrayed cartoonist Charles M. Schulz as a deeply troubled man (see “Comics in Context” #204: “Was It a Dark and Stormy Life?”). “Evanier, in contrast, presents Kirby as a decent and generous soul with some understandable fits of frustration. . . .but a reader”–by which Gold really means a specific reader, himself–“hungers for something deeper to explain his violent and angry imagery.”

Evanier refers to the nightmares that plagued Kirby after his return from World War II. Alluding to these, Gold continues, “Kirby seems to have had post-traumatic stress disorder after World War II, and I suspect that certain recurrent figures in his artwork came from his unconscious attempt to work out the horror of the battlefield.”

Well, perhaps the last part of the statement is true, although all one need do is look at the Captain America artwork from the early 1940s in Evanier’s book to see that Kirby was already creating explosively violent imagery before he ever entered the army. Gold may be overstating the case by claiming that Kirby had “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Yes, his nightmares were a symptom, but is there any evidence that Kirby’s behavior when he was awake was altered by his war experiences? The National Institute of Mental Health’s website states that people afflicted with this disorder “avoid situations that remind them of the original incident” that induced the severe mental stress. Then why did Kirby continually draw on his war experiences in his stories, as Evanier points out in the book?

On the other hand, Gold may be underrating Kirby’s “fits of frustration” as a source for his anger. In his book Evanier pointedly reprints Kirby’s full-page close-up of an enraged Silver Surfer from Silver Surfer #18 (September 1970) as an expression of the intensity of the feelings that led Kirby to quit Marvel for DC (see Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics, p. 162).

Moreover, I should think that Kirby’s childhood as a gang member on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, continually getting into fights, as Evanier describes in his first chapter, and as dramatized through the book’s reprinting of Kirby’s story “Street Code,” easily provides part of the explanation for the “violence” in Kirby’s comics.

Certainly Kirby, the co-creator of the Hulk must have known what it was like to feel anger, even rage. But to characterize Kirby’s visual imagery as “violent and angry” seems to me misleading. I wonder about the mindsets of various contemporary comics editors, writers and artists who inflict rape, mutilation and murder on longrunning characters. But I never have the sense that Kirby inflicts unwarranted cruelty upon his characters. (Even violence inflicted upon “Terrible” Turpin in The New Gods, unusually brutal for a Kirby book, ultimately serves to heighten the courageous cop’s heroism.) Ben Grimm’s battle cry, “It’s clobbering time!”, is more often than not an expression of joy. There is an exuberance about the heroes’ fight scenes in Kirby’s work, like Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn dueling in swashbuckler movies. Captain America’s action scenes embody the classic American spirit, striving for freedom, triumphing over oppression. Other Kirby heroes may not be explicitly patriotic in theme, but they represent a similar spirit.

Besides, if you pay attention, Kirby doesn’t draw that much actual violence. He characteristically takes an abstract approach to it: he draws a flash of light representing impact, rather than actually showing a fist connecting with a jaw, as we shall see in the course of my commentary.

In other words, whereas recent superhero comics, at their worst, exhibit a sadistic fascination with pain and suffering, Kirby’s comics use images of the human body in action–running, leaping, flying, and even fighting–to convey sheer, uplifting joy. Far from exuding anger, Kirby’s comics communicate a positive outlook on humanity and the prospects for the world.

At the point in Kirby: King of Comics where I left off in January, World War II had ended, and DC Comics’ editorial had lost interest in having anyone–even the brilliant team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby–act as outside suppliers for them. So, after a few commercial misfires at Harvey, Simon and Kirby launched the romance comic genre by creating Young Romance, which became a tremendous hit. So much for the foresight of the DC bureaucracy circa the late 1940s.

Although Evanier doesn’t make a point of this, the illustrations in this section of the book show that Kirby was rapidly growing as an artist in the postwar years. Look at the stoical face of the figure in the electric chair in the cover from Justice Traps the Guilty #8 (1948) (Evanier p. 73) and the classically handsome build of the half-crouching diver (as a school of fish drift past him, in a lovely grace note) in the cover of Black Magic #189 (1952) (Evanier p. 77).

An impressive page by Kirby and Simon from Boys’ Ranch #2 (1950) (Evanier p. 81) demonstrates their skill in enabling their characters to “act.” One usually thinks of Jack Kirby as drawing situations, emotions and characters that are larger than life, on an operatic scale. But consider the subtlety he shows on this page.

In the second panel a Native American, Running Bear, races from a burning cabin, carrying a white boy he has rescued. There are no words in this panel, nor the speed lines so often used to indicate motion in comics. The figure of Running Bear is positioned as if running, but has a stillness about him as well. His face concealed, pressed against the baby, to shield both the child and himself from the flames, his arms firmly wrapped around the boy, Running Bear seems like an iconic figure of parental concern. Pieces of wood are falling from the cabin, yet they seem to hover around Running Bear, as if time has stood still for a moment as he makes his escape. Rather than give us a conventional look at flames, Kirby takes a nearly abstract approach. as if Running Bear has emerged from a portal of light and shadow. In the right foreground we see the back of another Native American’s head, with his left hand raised, watching. Again, we are shown no facial expressions, and read no dialogue, yet the onlooker’s sense of concern comes across simply from the position of his hand and the tilt of his head. He stands in for the reader, reacting as we should, with a certain awe, to the sight of this heroic rescuer of the child escaping this inferno.

In panel three the rescued child wails silently, venting emotion as openly as an infant, but his rescuer is far more reserved, looking outward, presumably at the burning cabin, as he states that the child’s parents are dead. There is a look of quiet melancholy in hs eyes, reinforced by the darkness beneath his eyebrows and the thin lines indicating shadows along his cheeks.

Running Bear declares he will adopt the white child, but another tribesman insists that he return the boy to the flames. This is a serious clash, but Kirby and Simon continue to underplay effectively: in panel five Running Bear looks grimly at the other Indian, clenching his jaw in quiet anger, as he states, simply but firmly, “I keep the papoose!” Bawling only a moment (and two panels) before, the baby is now quiet, looking warily at the other Indian while seeming comfortable in Running Bear’s grasp, apparently recognizing him as his new protector.

The final panel of the page is a little masterpiece of “acting,” as running Best looks down at his newly adopted son, with parental warmth, the child responds, smiling up at him, and the other Indian watches, his jaw set in a tight frown, clearly resentful of Running Bear’s decision.

Longtime Marvelites may realize that Kirby later restaged this scene of a warrior adopting an orphaned son of his enemies, in the Tales of Asgard story in which Odin found and adopted the infant Loki (in Journey into Mystery #112, 1964).

Then there’s the cover to Simon and Kirby’s war comic Foxhole #1 (1954) (Evanier p. 85). Recently a friend and I were leafing through a copy of Kirby: King of Comics at a bookstore and came across this page, whereupon my friend declared it to be one of the greatest comics covers ever. (In his Washington Post review, Gold says he was stunned by it as well.) In the foreground is a soldier, his face wrapped in bandages, save for one eye, and his mouth, holding a cigarette. The bandages on the side if his head are stained with blood. He wears a helmet with two thick dents caused by bullets. He looks something like DC’s later war comics character, the Unknown Soldier. But the man on the foxhole cover is another of Kirby’s iconic figures, this one representing both the horrors suffered in war and the survivors’ ability to endure. The soldier is writing a letter to his mother, and we see part of it floating above a scene of the aftermath of battle, with corpses on a shore and medics attending a wounded man. The letter provides easy irony: the war is “a day on the beach.” But the soldier isn’t smiling or even looking at what he’s writing. His single eye stares emptily, as if he is lost in his own thoughts about the war, disconnected from the brave, witty front he is putting up for his mother back home. This cover is an entire story in itself.

Simon and Kirby and their studio kept busy and prospered during this period, but Evanier quotes Kirby as saying it was “too good to last” (Evanier p. 80) and it didn’t. I’ve learned from my own experience and observing those of others that when you–and your colleagues–are in a successful period in your life and career, it may seem as if it will last forever, but everything changes, and success can be surprisingly fleeting. Kirby had enough insight to realize this even this early in his career, with greater triumphs and equally great disappointments still lying before him.

Apart from “Street Code,” the only complete story reprinted in Kirby: King of Comics is “The League of the Handsome Devils!” from Simon and Kirby’s Fighting American #2 (1954). Fighting American and Speedboy were variations on Captain America and Bucky: the patriotically-themed hero and his kid sidekick. Evanier points out that by 1954 the superhero genre was mostly “passe.” Indeed, as I noted two weeks ago, except for the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, superheroes had virtually vanished from comics, and the superhero phenomenon must have seemed like a passing fad that had run its course. Hence, Simon and Kirby thought that taking a tongue-in-cheek approach might breathe new life into it. However, Evanier points out that “Fighting American. . .just got sillier and sillier, prompting one critic to suggest that Joe and Jack were deliberately screwing with the formula they’d invented, just to see if anyone would notice” (Evanier p. 88).

A sign that a genre has run its course in its current form is when it degenerates into self-parody. Hence, for example, Universal”˜s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein originated in serious horror films in the 1930s, but were reduced to playing villains to Abbott and Costello by the late 1940s. I’ve also seen it said that you know when a genre has run out of steam when Mel Brooks gets around to parodying it. With Fighting American it seemed that not even two of the foremost creators of the Golden Age of superheroes could take the genre seriously any more.

But thinking about Fighting American, I realized that in one way Simon and Kirby were once again ahead of their time with that series. Didn’t Fighting American in 1954 anticipate the “camp” treatment of superheroes in American pop culture a dozen years later, most notably through the 1966 Batman TV show? Wasn’t the Batman show really a parody of the superhero comics of the 1940s and 1950s, viewed from the ironic perspective of the 1960s, as if the genre had failed to adapt to changing times?

But I don’t believe that any major genre truly dies. Rather, it may languish until an inspired creator finds a way to revitalize it for a new generation and time, as, say, George Lucas did for the “space opera” with Star Wars or the adventure movie serial with the Indiana Jones movies.

When Simon and Kirby created Fighting American, the birth of the Silver Age of Comics, with the debut of editor Julius Schwartz’s revamped Flash in Showcase #4, was only two years away. But the true revolution in the superhero genre would come about in the early 1960s through Stan Lee’s collaboration with Kirby, Steve Ditko and others on “the Marvel Age of Comics.”

Thus Kirby would be in large part responsible for the resurrection and reinvention if the superhero genre which transformed it from a wartime fad into an enduring component of American popular culture that has now spread from comics into novels, cinema and television.

But, it appears, it was Stan Lee who was the essential catalyst in the Marvel revolution. Simon and Kirby were content in Fighting American to mock a genre that had seemingly run its course. They did not come up with a way of revitalizing the superhero genre for the postwar era. It was Stan Lee who instigated taking the superhero genre in a new direction that led to its great success in many media today.

Evanier explains that the particular Fighting American story he reprints was originally published just before the institution of the Comics Code Authority, the comics industry’s self-censorship board, and was subsequently republished in 1966. He provides “before” and “after” versions of the first panel after the introductory splash, showing a murder victim being seized from behind, as his hat falls off to one side. In Kirby and Simon’s original, a menacing hand extends from the right, holding an ice pick, about to thrust it into the victim’s chest. A hand from the left grips the man’s throat. The victim’s eyes are tightly shut, and his tongue extends outward as he screams: “AAAA!” In the Code-approved 1966 version, the ice pick, the sound effect for the scream. and even the hand that gripped the victim’s throat have all vanished. The man’s eyes are now open, and his tongue is no longer visible (Evanier p. 88).

But I find I prefer the second version to the first. Kirby puts such anguish into the murder victim’s face, and creates such a vivid sense of movement –the way the man’s head tilts back, the way his hat falls away–that he creates a powerful image of desperation, pain, and distress. The hand on the right may no longer hold a weapon, but clenched into a fist, it remains both ominous and mysterious. The deleted scream, ice pick and tongue seem like gilding the lily. The later, simpler version is perfectly sufficient, again demonstrating Kirby’s ability to capture iconic imagery on the page.

The rest of the story has some striking visual images. Take panel four of page two (Evanier p. 90), in which the two gentlemanly murderers bow, hats in hand, to an elderly lady. The two men do not look alike, and yet their identical poses and expressions make them comical mirror images of one another. The top of a skyscraper rises above each man’s head, adding to the sense of duality.

The topmost panel of the story’s fourth page might be the archetypal Kirby image of a punch (Evanier p. 92). Kirby doesn’t actually show Fighting American’s fist connecting with the bad guy’s jaw; rather, Kirby has created a picture of the sheer energy of the punch. Fighting American’s left arm is at the bottom of a half-circular arc tracing the movement of his fist. There is a flash of light, signifying the energy released by the force of Fighting American’s blow. The villain is catapulted away, so powerfully that he seems to fly through the air, and collides with a wooden post, which snaps and shatters from the impact. Kirby and Simon have given us not the punch itself but its immediate aftermath, which provides the more dramatic image.

The most remarkable visual sequence in the story comes in the bottom tier of the fifth page (Evanier p. 93). On first glance it seems to be a cinematic sequence in which a single villain pulls off his face mask over the course of three panels. Look again and you’ll find that each of the three panels depicts a different man, each ugly in a different way. But Kirby and Simon have staged the sequence so that in the first panel a man begins pulling off his mask, which still covers the top of his head; in the second, a different man has pulled his mask entirely off, and in the third, an unmasked man grotesquely smiles in triumph as he lifts his mask up high. It looks like a single continuous action divided among three men. This serves a thematic purpose, as well, linking the three men together as members of the “Handsome Devils” by having them act in unison, just like the handsome bowing murderers on the second page. But this tine the effect is not comedic but eerily bizarre.

In the middle tier of the next to last page of the story, Kirby and Simon devise a variation on the classic pyramidal composition in art. This time the pyramid consists of the three bad guys, bunched together, framed in either side by Speedboy and Fighting American, each delivering knockout blows. The plots in Fighting American might not have been serious, but Simon and Kirby’s devotion to the craft of visual storytelling was.

But despite Simon and Kirby’s mastery of their artform, the comics industry was in sharp decline, in large part due to the widespread allegations in the 1950s that comics fomented juvenile delinquency. Simon and Kirby’s own company, Mainline, went under, and Simon became an editor at Harvey. One of the greatest artists in the business, Jack Kirby, who had been riding high only a short time before, was now on his own and out of work. World War II aside, it was the scariest time of his life,” Evanier recounts, literally giving Kirby nightmares about being unable to support his wife and children. This man of extraordinary talent found himself figuratively on the edge of an abyss. Considering the economic news in the papers lately, and commentators likening the present day to 1929, perhaps it is easier for many of us today to comprehend what that must feel like.

Some of us might also identify with Kirby in that, like many creative people who are best suited to working in their art, he was temperamentally unsuited to networking and self-promotion. Simon had been the businessman in their partnership; “as skillful as he [Kirby] was with stories and art, he was still weak in the area of salesmanship” (Evanier p. 99).

People in today’s comics industry might further see parallels in their own lives with Kirby’s dilemma in looking for work outside comics. “No luck,” reports Evanier. “His skills only seemed marketable in one line of radically diminishing work. If he could do anything else, he didn’t know what it was” (Evanier p. 99). Kirby was one of the greatest masters of his chosen artform, yet the rest of the world regarded him as useless.

After a short stint doing the Yellow Claw for Stan Lee at the company that would later become Marvel, Kirby briefly reunited with Simon to create Challengers of the Unknown at DC. Silver Age artist Gil Kane asserted that the DC production department “kept demanding Jack strip his work of all the sharp edges and stylistic innovations that gave it its power and energy” (Evanier p. 101). This is an example of corporate conventional wisdom at its worst: unable or unwilling to perceive Kirby’s true artistry, these champions of mediocrity demanded that Kirby reduce his creative standards to their level. Evanier quotes Kirby as saying, “They kept showing me their other books–books that weren’t selling–and saying, “˜This is what a comic book ought to be'” (Evanier p. 101). This is the measure of their blindness: they would rather go down with the ship rather than try something different that might save them in a changing market. Yet Kirby, who had had so many hits over two decades by this point, was hardly a radical newcomer! And, to pose a rhetorical question, just how do the artistic reputations of the majority of DC’s pencilers of the 1950s compare to Kirby’s nowadays?

Perhaps you are telling yourself that the world of comics is much more enlightened now, a half century later. Is it? Ask yourselves which of your favorite artists or writers–newcomers or veterans–isn’t getting enough work in comics right now, perhaps because his or her work doesn’t fit the conventional wisdom at the major companies about “what a comic book ought to be” in today’s market. Who’s being unjustly ignored now?

Next came Kirby’s remarkable collaboration with another legend, Wally Wood, on Sky Masters, a newspaper comic strip about space travel: Wood’s inking endowed Kirby’s visions of the fantastic with the look of precise, detailed realism.

It might have seemed an ideal project, except for the fact that Kirby was getting paid so little for it. The real life villain of this piece was DC’s Batman editor Jack Schiff, who demanded an undeserved cut of the earnings. It’s bad enough for Schiff’s reputation that he presided over Batman during the series’ creative nadir, but that merely makes him guilty of having bad taste. The Kirby book casts Schiff as a greedy, vengeful man who did his best to sink Kirby’s career; Superman editor Mort Weisinger also comes across quite poorly in Evanier’s telling.

A half century ago Schiff and Weisinger doubtless thought that no outside party would ever learn about their mistreatment of Kirby, and even if anyone did, no one cared about people who worked in comic books. But today’s comics company executives and editors should take notice. There will be more biographies about major figures in American comic books, and autobiographies by some of them as well. Kirby: King of Comics will be far from the last book that probes the history of the American comics industry. If film histories provide an example, these scholars are far more likely to take the side of the creative artist in a dispute with one or more of the “suits.” Today, for example, who defends the RKO studio’s corporate decision to take The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) away from its director Orson Welles, severely cut it, and shoot a new ending? People at comics companies should now ask themselves: how will their decisions look to historians ten, twenty or fifty years from now? The present administration at Marvel had nothing to do with the company’s poor treatment of Kirby in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, yet that still stains the company’s reputation, and probably will continue to do so for years to come.

In 1959 Kirby briefly collaborated again with Simon on two projects, including Adventures of the Fly, a revision of a previous series concept of Simon’s, The Silver Spider. Since Schiff had slammed DC’s doors sit on him, Kirby had only one place left to find work: the company once called Timely, then known as Atlas, and that would soon take the name Marvel. Kirby, it seems, would have preferred not to work for Lee, who had been his former office “go-pher.” But Stan Lee recognized Kirby’s greatness as an artist, and, however obvious that may seem to us today, it appears to have been a rare insight back in 1960. Give Stan Lee credit as a visionary who could see back then what the editors at DC–and, indeed, the world at large at that time–could not.

Back then, Marvel, now this corporate monolith, was so small that, Evanier remarks, “some felt that he [publisher Martin Goodman] only kept the comics going so Stan Lee would have a job” (Evanier p. 111). Goodman had nearly shut the comics line down in 1957, and Kirby recalled Goodman briefly terminating the comics in 1961, although Evanier casts doubt on this.

What would have happened if Martin Goodman had closed down his comics line for good? If Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had never had the chance to collaborate on the Marvel revolution? If instead Lee and Kirby had both ended up leaving the comic book business–although what they would have done instead is a good question–and had never teamed up again? Would there be superhero comics today? Would there be superhero movies today? Would there be comic books of any kind, or the specialty stores that sell them? Would the graphic novel revolution of the last few decades have occurred without the comics shops and a prosperous American comics industry? Or would American comic books have simply died as the “mom and pop” stores that sold them to kids faded away. as did the 1960s head shops that sold the undergrounds?

Without Lee and Kirby’s Marvel revolution, which redefined and reenergized the superhero genre for a new generation of older readers, this column would not exist, nor would most of the Internet sites about comics, and most of us in America who have devoted our careers to comics as an art form would be doing something else.

How easily the course of American popular culture would have been different if Martin Goodman had given up publishing comics as a dead end, or if Stan Lee, feeling creatively frustrated, had quit comics in 1961 as he once intended, or even if Jack Schiff had not blackballed Jack Kirby from DC. How many lives would have been changed over the last four decades?

These are questions that Mark Evanier does not address in his book. What if circumstances had been different and Jack Kirby had taken a different path when he reached this crossroads in the history of popular culture? Now there’s a “What If?” story for Marvel!

But Lee and Kirby did come together at the right time and the right place, and in 1961 they jointly created Fantastic Four #1, the Big Bang of the Marvel Universe. Look at the familiar final pages of the FF’s origin story reprinted in this book (Evanier pgs. 116-117). We’ve ready seen in Kirby: King of Comics that Jack Kirby could masterfully draw action scenes, visually render characterization, and even draw monsters like the FF’s Thing. But in this collaboration of Lee and Kirby, both in the words and in the pictures, there is a sense of drama, rooted in character, expressed through dialogue and action, that is unlike anything Evanier showed us earlier in his book. Here at the crossroads, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby laid out the new road for the superhero genre and for American comics, as we shall see next week.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson