VARIA
Member
I feel bad for Jack, poor guy went to the grave with huge resentments it seems.
Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/
Stan Lee talk starts on page 6.
GROTH: When did you meet Stan Lee for the first time?
KIRBY: I met Stan Lee when I first went to work for Marvel. He was a little boy. When Joe and I were doing Captain America. He was about 13 years old. Hes about five years younger than me. I thought Stan Lee was a bother. You know he was the kind of kid that liked to fool around open and close doors on you. Yeah. In fact, once I told Joe to throw him out of the room. I couldnt do anything about Stan Lee because he was the publishers cousin. He ran back and forth around New York doing things that he was told to do. He would slam doors and come up to you and look over your shoulder and annoy you in a lot of ways. Joe [Simon] would probably elaborate on it.
GROTH: And you two collaborated on all the monster stories?
KIRBY: Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! Ive never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did.
GROTH: On all the monster stories it says Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. What did he do to warrant his name being on them?
KIRBY: Nothing! OK?
GROTH: Did he dialogue them?
KIRBY: No, I dialogued them. If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office. I would write out the whole story on the back of every page. I would write the dialogue on the back or a description of what was going on. Then Stan Lee would hand them to some guy and he would write in the dialogue. In this way Stan Lee made more pay than he did as an editor. This is the way Stan Lee became the writer. Besides collecting the editors pay, he collected writers pay. Im not saying Stan Lee had a bad business head on. I think he took advantage of whoever was working for him.
GROTH: Let me ask you something that I think is an important point: Stan wrote the way you guys worked and I think hes referring to the monster stories specifically here he wrote, I had only to give Jack an outline of the story and he would draw the entire strip breaking down the outline into exactly the right number of panels. Then it remained for me to take Jacks artwork and add the captions and dialogue which would hopefully add a dimension of reality to sharply delineated characterization. So hes saying that he gave you a plot, and you would draw it, and he would add the captions and dialogue.
ROZ KIRBY: I remember Jack would call him up and say its going to be this kind of story or that kind of story and just send him the story. And hed write in everything on the side.
KIRBY: Remember this: Stan Lee was an editor. He worked from nine to five doing business for Martin Goodman. In other words he didnt do any writing in the office. He did Martin Goodmans business. That was his function. There were people coming up to the office to talk all the time. They werent always artists, they were business people. Stan Lee was the first man they would see and Stan Lee would see if he could get them in to see Martin Goodman. That was Stan Lees function.
GROTH: Can you tell me give me your version of how The Fantastic Four came about? Did Stan go to you ?
KIRBY: No, Stan didnt know what a mutation was. I was studying that kind of stuff all the time. I would spot it in the newspapers and science magazines. I still buy magazines that are fanciful. I dont read as much science fiction as I did at that time. 1 was a student of science fiction and I began to make up my own story patterns, my own type of people. Stan Lee doesnt think the way I do. Stan Lee doesnt think of people when he thinks of [characters]. I think of [characters] as real people. If I drew a war story it would be two guys caught in the war. The Fantastic Four to me are people who were in a jam suddenly you find yourself invisible, suddenly you find yourself flexible.
ROZ KIRBY: Gary wants to know how you created The Fantastic Four.
GROTH: Did you approach Marvel or
KIRBY: It came about very simply. I came in [to the Marvel offices] and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out and I needed the work! I had a family and a house and all of a sudden Marvel is coming apart. Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didnt know what to do, hes sitting in a chair crying he was just still out of his adolescence. I told him to stop crying. I says. Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture out, and Ill see that the books make money. And I came up with a raft of new books and all these books began to make money. Somehow they had faith in me. I knew 1 could do it, but I had to come up with fresh characters that nobody had seen before. I came up with The Fantastic Four. I came up with Thor. Whatever it took to sell a book I came up with. Stan Lee has never been editorial minded. It wasnt possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasnt a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK? Im essentially something else: Im a storyteller. My job is to sell my stories. When I saw this happening at Marvel I stopped the whole damned bunch. I stopped them from moving the furniture! Stan Lee was sitting on some kind of a stool, and he was crying.
GROTH: Who came up with the name Fantastic Four?
KIRBY: I did. All right? I came up with all those names. I came up with Thor because Ive always been a history buff. I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school thats what kept me in school it wasnt mathematics and it wasnt geography; it was history.
GROTH: Stan says he conceptualized virtually everything in The Fantastic Four that he came up with all the characters. And then he said that he wrote a detailed synopsis for Jack to follow.
ROZ KIRBY: Ive never seen anything.
KIRBY: Ive never seen it, and of course I would say thats an outright lie.
GROTH: There was a period between 61 and 63 when you were just drawing a tremendous number of books.
ROZ KIRBY: May I make one point? In all these years, when Jack was still creating things, Stan Lee hasnt been creating things. When Jack left Stan, there wasnt anything new created by Stan.
KIRBY: Yeah. Stan never created anything new after that. If he says he created things all that easily, what did he create after I left? Thats the point. Have they done anything new? Hell probably tell you, I didnt have to.
Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/
Stan Lee talk starts on page 6.
