Book Review: According to Jack Kirby by Michael Hill

"According to Jack Kirby: Insights drawn from interviews with comics' greatest creator"
by Michael Hill

Lulu Books

2021

ISBN 9781667133072

available here

Review by BK Munn

This fascinating new book by Canadian comics scholar Michael Hill documents one of the greatest art crimes of the 20th Century, the billion dollar theft of the Marvel Comics characters, told from the point of view of the artist who created them, Jack Kirby. Many people are familiar with the corporate fiction recounted to this day by Marvel and its parent company Disney, and parroted in every news media article, of how the genius writer Stan Lee dreamed up his super hero universe in the 1960s and spun it into a vast empire of toys, movies, and video games, making Stan Lee a millionaire and leading to his many cameos in the beloved Marvel films. The real story is quite different, and it's the story of how middle-aged cartoonist Jack Kirby, desperate for work because his own comics company had just gone out of business and he had been blacklisted from working at DC Comics (publisher of Superman and Batman), came to work for Stan Lee at the tiny little company that would become Marvel. 

Stan Lee, the cousin of the publisher, had started as an office boy 20 years earlier and now was the sole employee of his cousin's comics company. Despite a downturn in the business, every month he was still responsible for getting a handful of comic books to print, hiring different writers and artists to create the various humour and cowboy stories he published. Stan even wrote a couple comics each month himself, specializing in "dumb blonde" humour titles like "Millie the Model." Jack Kirby was a seasoned pro at this point, with a legendary and varied resume. The co-creator of Captain America and dozens of other super hero, science fiction and adventure titles, he had also invented the entire genre of romance comics before falling on hard times. Kirby pitched a line of superhero comics to Stan, drawing presentation boards of characters, and then returned to his home studio to plot, write and draw the comics. Once a week he'd drop his pencilled pages off at the office and Stan would revise his dialogue, adding captions and word balloons in the jokey, wisecracking, chummy style that would come to be his hallmark, before sending the pages off to be prepared for printing. Because he added the revised dialogue on top of Kirby's already completed stories, and because he occasionally would make suggestions about the direction of the series and ask for art revisions, Stan credited himself as "Writer" and gave himself a paycheque for every comic Kirby turned in, in addition to his salary as editor. Kirby meanwhile was credited only as "Artist" and was paid by the page as a freelancer with no benefits or royalties. This was the working relationship that led to Kirby's creation of The Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, etc. (The same "division of labour" was applied when cartoonist Steve Ditko worked on Spider-Man, based originally on another Kirby proposal, and Dr. Strange.) With the rising popularity of the characters, Stan Lee became the voice of Marvel Comics, writing advertising copy and editorials every month about this fun clubhouse of happy artists (most of whom worked from home and never met each other) he rode herd on, churning out the interconnected fantasy tales that the fans loved.

By the end of the 1960s, Ditko and Kirby had finally quit and Stan had to hire a new batch of writers and artists to continue the adventures of their characters. At the same time, Marvel was sold to a bigger company and the new bosses were anxious to secure their ownership of this now valuable intellectual property. Stan kept his job by claiming he was the sole creator of all the characters, signed a document and gave interviews to that effect, and even started writing books recounting his mythic creation stories ("The Origin of Marvel Comics" et al), even though after Kirby left the company Stan never "created" another memorable comic or character again, while Kirby went on to create hundreds more for different publishers.

Michael Hill has written this book as a corrective to the corporate propaganda that fans and journalists alike still repeat every day. He has done this by extensively quoting the interviews Kirby himself gave starting in the early 1960s and by meticulously poking logical holes in every building block of the ridiculous legal fantasy of Stan Lee as the creative force behind the Marvel revolution. Of course, these days you'll see Jack Kirby gets credited as co-creator in some of the movies and comics, in part because his family sued Disney after Kirby died and Disney settled with them before the case got to The Supreme Court, but the myth of loveable Stan Lee is a hard one to give up, especially for fans raised on a diet of the comics and the blockbuster "Marvel Cinematic Universe," but Hill's book goes a long way towards setting the record straight.