STAN, JACK AND JOE STUFF

In response to this post about Jack Kirby and credit-sharing, I wrote:

Kirby did one long interview with COMICS JOURNAL back in the 80s, which I confess I haven't reread for years. It's my memory, though, that he said something to the effect that, "Back in those days (the Marvel years), nobody ever thought any of this stuff would be worth anything." Now, on one hand, this might be an oversimplification, since Kirby certainly knew that Superman had become a huge franchise. On the other hand, even in the sixties, he might've had had little faith in other franchises to become valuable over time; that maybe Superman was a special case, and therefore anything he co-created with Simon or with Lee was just going to be a passing fad. On the third hand (?), he also probably knew that Martin Goodman would never have made an equitable deal with him no matter what, so taking more than his fair share of credit was the only way he'd feel like he'd gotten back at Marvel's inequities-- even though it meant marginalizing the contributions of Simon and Lee.

All that said, I should add that from everything I've read of Jack Kirby, he tended to re-invent almost every script given him-- and I think that he was aware as to how much new stuff he brought to the table. I don't think that creative process is enough to establish him as "sole creator" of any collaborative enterprise, though. The finished product has to be the basis of any creative judgment, and if Comic A was based on an idea by Stan Lee, then visually elaborated by Jack Kirby, and then subjected to scripting-alterations by Lee again-- then Kirby's not the sole creator.

In the CRIVENS essay Kid brings up Kirby's tendency to omit former business-partner Joe Simon from later discussions. I agree that this does not always reflect well on Jack Kirby-- and yet, I don't think that Kirby work-relationship with Simon was quite the same as the Kirby-Lee relationship.

For one thing, the devoted comics-historian has a pretty good idea as to how Stan Lee wrote stories in the twenty-odd years before his collaboration with Kirby. But Simon teamed up with Kirby so early in their respective careers that Simon's creative personality is harder to pin down.

Here's how I speculate things went down in the Simon-Kirby Shop: Simon may have discussed story ideas with Kirby before either of them put pencil to paper, just as Stan later discussed ideas with Jack. But since Kirby was far more the production powerhouse. I speculate that Kirby probably did the lion's share of the penciling during the partnership, and that he probably never "wrote" a script in that whole time, but simply poured the story as he saw it out onto the drawing-board. I tend to doubt that either Simon or Kirby wrote the dialogue on these collaborations, though, since neither of them showed themselves facile with good dialogue in later days. I suspect they used a host of unidentified scripters, particularly during the Simon-Kirby days at DC, since DC editorial insisted on a more formal approach to scripting than the two artists had known at Timely. The scripters were probably hired by Simon, so in a sense Simon extended his sense of the story through these intermediaries, in contrast to Stan Lee's approach, where he himself usually did the scripting (though on occasion an intermediary would be credited with finishing the script to a Stan-plot.)

In my essay SIMON SESSION I said:

Following the dissolution of Joe Simon’s partnership with Kirby, though, almost nothing Simon authored has accrued a fan-base. I’ve argued that he may have provided “quality control” for Jack Kirby, whose wild creativity sometimes resulted in incoherent narratives. However, very little of the material Simon authored without Kirby shows even modest creativity.

I still believe that Jack Kirby needed "quality control" during most of his career, and during the Kirby-Simon partnership much of the work that they did spans the gamut from "pretty good" to (more rarely) "really good." But it's one thing to get quality control from someone who doesn't have much creativity, and another thing to get it from someone who does possess the creative spark. To repeat myself once more, I don't seek to justify Kirby's omission of Joe Simon's contributions, though I can see why Kirby might've imagined that he was the only one doing any heavy lifting in that relationship.

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different, and I think Kirby got from Lee as good as he gave. But Kirby had spent a long, long time spinning his fantasies on the drawing-board, and he probably wasn't all that sensitive to the ways in which Lee MAY have turned him in new directions. Years later, when Kirby was seeking to reclaim his original art from the recalcitrant Marvel Comics, the artist said many dismissive things about Stan's talents, and some fans have taken those pronouncements as gospel. To me, the obvious fact that Kirby's later solo productions abjured the "soap opera" approach of Marvel proves to me that Kirby did not originate this approach to characterization, despite the fact that together Kirby and Lee could do soap-opera tropes better than anyone else in the business.

Kirby, unlike most professionals in his time, had an incredible capacity to remember and rework dozens of story-tropes from dozens of genres, so that much of his work, alone or in collaboration, seems like raw creativity unleashed. But he didn't always know the best way to channel his own creativity, precisely because he was so many-faceted. In addition, that creativity insured that he could never be entirely comfortable just cranking out stories for a client like DC Comics, and even if he didn't especially want to return to Marvel in the late 1950s, the ways in which his talent responded to Stan Lee's innovations re-defined the superhero genre at a time when the comic-book medium lay on the edge of extinction. Without the intense fandom that arose from Marvel Comics, it's possible that few readers would even care these days about sorting out who did what, and why.