Jack's Year

Had he been as immortal as his work, Jack Kirby would have been 100 years old on August 28 of this year. Conventions and comic book companies are doing all sorts of things to celebrate the life of this man I had the honor of knowing and working for.

Yes, I am still finishing that humongous biography of him that his widow Roz asked me to write decades ago. It was delayed a lot as various Kirby-related legal matters caused her, or after she passed, the family or their lawyers to ask me to stand down for a time. Other matters, some of which you know if you read this blog, slowed things further. But I'm now back completing a book that's too important for me to be rushed for any arbitrary on-sale date. Sometime next year looks very possible.

In the meantime, it should not be confused with this year's reissue/upgrade of my 2008 book on Jack, Kirby: King of Comics. The new edition is smaller (page-wise), slightly-longer (one new chapter/update) and has a number of new illustrations. It can be ordered here and despite whatever it may say there about a release date, I'm assured there will be copies aplenty at Comic-Con International which commences in — shudder, shudder — 52 days. Most of it is the old book, though I took the opportunity to clean up some confusing language here and there throughout.

Right now, I want to say a few things about this fine article by a writer named Mark Peters, one being that, yes, Jack really was that amazing.

Secondly, this is not a correction but a clarification. Peters writes, "Marvel settled a 2014 lawsuit with the Kirby heirs that was headed to the Supreme Court." True…but I have to keep reminding people that that was a lawsuit Marvel filed against the Kirby heirs. Neither Jack nor his family ever sued Marvel. He threatened it a few times but then Marvel reps threatened a few times to sue him. He did not sue Marvel. His heirs did not sue Marvel. They filed, as per the law, to reclaim some copyrights but they did not sue Marvel. I keep hearing from folks who should know better, including some who worked in high positions at Marvel, that there was this lawsuit from Jack that was filed and won, filed and lost or filed and settled. Never happened and like I said, his kids didn't sue Marvel, either.

Then I want to quote one paragraph and say one other thing. Here, first, is the paragraph…

At Marvel, Kirby worked with Stan Lee to create just about every significant Marvel hero, villain and concept, from Cosmic Cubes to the planet-eating Galactus. Lee has received disproportionate credit for their work, partly due to a misunderstanding of what the two creators actually did. As Marvel Comics was exploding in the 1960s, Lee had too many comics on his plate to crank out full scripts. So he would come up with short plot summaries and let his two visionary artists — Kirby and Steve Ditko — plot out the issues they illustrated. Lee would then return to fill in the dialogue. Known as "Marvel method" or "Marvel style," this process created many classic comics. It was also partly responsible for Kirby and Ditko not getting due credit or compensation for their work. Few understood that the illustrators were writing as much, if not more than, the writer.

This paragraph is basically true though I think it actually understates the artists' contributions. I have met and talked with just about everyone who was around then and who was available to talk about it — Ditko, Heck, Brodsky, Goldberg, Ayers, Stan's brother Larry, and even Stan himself. All of them (repeat: all) said it was like that and that when Stan came up with "short plot summaries," even Stan said that often, they were practically nothing — just a sentence or two and sometimes verbal — and that often they were the results of brainstorming sessions with the artists, meaning that the artists had the basic ideas.

Stan has said otherwise on some occasions but I choose to believe the more generous things he told me because (a) they match what everyone else said and (b) why on any plane of existence would someone overcredit his collaborators, especially to someone like me who he knew was writing about that history? I discuss all this in much greater detail in the next book.