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Patrick Ford With A Second Take On TCJ’s Re-Publication Of Their 1989 Jack Kirby Interview
posted May 25, 2011
 

I posted at TCJ.com that it's hard to see any way of looking at the writing situation between Lee and Kirby except that Stan was stealing from Kirby.

Consider that when Ditko insisted on being credited and paid for plotting Spider-Man, Lee quit speaking to him. Ditko said in a letter to Comic Book Marketplace he had to leave his pages with Brodsky, Lee wouldn't see him. There is also the case of Dick Ayers. Ayers said in Alter-Ego magazine that when he insisted on being paid for plotting Sgt. Fury, Lee tried to laugh it off. When Ayers pressed Lee on the issue Lee credited Ayers with "lettering." When I asked Evanier about this he speculated that it was because if Ayers had been credited with plotting a percentage would have been taken from Stan's page rate. If you notice Stan then left the book, and Ayers was credited, and paid for plots on the book.

Stan picking Jack's pocket went so far as Stan taking plot credit on stories where Kirby supplied layouts (and obviously plot), but were dialogued by someone other than Lee. Of course the fan reaction to this is to change the subject, and accuse Kirby of being weak, or saying he should have quit. Or to say he's a liar.

Imagine Kirby who had been the main writer for the Simon and Kirby studio seeing Stan pay his brother Larry for writing, Larry being a guy with no writing experience. How must Kirby have felt when Stan brought in kids like Roy Thomas, and Dennis O'Neil to write at Marvel because Stan was so busy he couldn't write all the books anymore. How would he have felt when if saw (if he knew) Dick Ayers was being paid for plotting Sgt. Fury and Ghost Rider (the Western)? Kirby was only the guy who both Kim Aamodt and Walter Geier said (two different Jim Amash interviews) gave them almost all the plots for the stories they scripted. Geir said, "They were Jack's stories, I just filled in the balloons." These weren't Kirby's penciled stories either, they were stories written for S&K studio artists. Both writers said they had never worked on a story penciled by Kirby.

And now we have Lee under oath saying he exaggerated Kirby's contribution to the plots in the "Origins" books because he "wanted to make Jack fell good." We have Stan saying he created Galactus with no input from Kirby, that the artists role in character creation was based on the chance that they might supply a, "good looking female bartender" in the background of a panel who might pique Stan's interest in such a way that he'd make that "extra" a star. This stuff is no longer casual conversational hyperbole, it's well-considered testimony.