Some artists simply couldn't put in hours like that. Now, that is very fast - someone like Curt Swan might do two a day - but Kirby's output was a function not just of drawing speed but of endurance and a willingness to sit at the drawing board 10-16 hours a day. During the late sixties and seventies, he did around fifteen pages per week of finished pencils (and, usually, script) and before that, he was even more prolific, occasionally managing 5-6 pages a day. Yes, but I think his pace gets exaggerated a bit for two reasons. And he would never, no matter how poor your work was, tell you to give up. If you showed Jack your work, he would not give you an art critique - he didn't do that kind of thing - but he would give you words of encouragement, along with pointers of a "spiritual" sense, discussing the mindset with which you should approach your work. In any case, he was an enormous supporter of New Talent. There were a few folks who - in my opinion - exploited his generosity far beyond decency…in some cases, quite without malice or even awareness of their impact on his life. He had a tendency to assume the best about everyone he met and to be angry later-on when, as occasionally happened, someone turned out to be undeserving of his trust and friendship. Jack was a very sweet man with a heart as large as his imagination - and if you read anything he ever did, you at least know how large his imagination could be. But, as stated above, there's a point beyond which one cannot tell who did what. Stan definitely contributed some of the more "cosmic" (for want of a better adjective) ideas and Jack certainly contributed some of the elements we might call "soap opera." There are specific contributions that I believe can be attributed to one or the other, at least in that one of them was the primary source. But after talking extensively with both Stan and Jack, as well as some of their co-workers…and after examining a lot of Stan Lee plot outlines and Jack Kirby marginal notes, my conclusion is that that wasn't always the case. Even looking just at the concepts and storylines, I think Jack contributed a lot more to them than Stan did.ĭidn't Kirby contribute the cosmic concepts and Lee contribute the human elements? None of this is meant to suggest I view it as a 50/50 collaboration. I also think Jack was wronged by credits that gave him no credit for anything other than drawing because he certainly did more than that. I do think Stan has been unfairly maligned by those who've said that all he did was retype and polish Jack's notations. Stan's dialogue sometimes closely paraphrased marginal notes that Jack wrote while drawing, and sometimes deviated altogether. The plots came from both, though Stan has acknowledged that once Marvel started to grow and he became busier, Jack was largely on his own to figure out the details of each story, if not the basic plotline. Even then, even where one person contributed 80% of the notion, they are still Lee-Kirby co-creations. Some of the ideas sound more like Stan to me, some sound more like Jack and there's some documentation and other evidence that suggests that certain ideas flowed more from one gent than the other. Ergo, I say that the Lee-Kirby creations are Lee-Kirby creations. This happens in any collaboration anywhere and, ultimately, you usually have to just say that they both had the idea. You also have the fact that when two creative talents get together and come up with an idea, each of them might honestly believe that he suggested at least the core of the concept if not the entire thing. Lee and Kirby both have / had notoriously poor memories. Beyond that, we run into all sorts of semantic arguments having to do with definitions of the word "writing" and with the fact that Mssrs. Well, it's safe to say Jack did all the penciling. Who did what on the Lee-Kirby collaborations? If you have a query not covered below, send it in and we'll try to get to it, if not here then in the pages of The Jack Kirby Collector, a fine periodical to which you're already subscribed if you have any interest in the man. Here's some of what gets asked and how it's answered. But I get more questions about Kirby than any five other topics combined.
I get a lot of questions in my e-mail about comics and movies and cartoons and other aberrant topics that folks think I know something about.
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