Last year, when “Kirby & Lee: STUF’ SAID!” (The special 75th issue of THE KIRBY COLLECTOR) came out, I was totally jacked (well, STAN and Jacked) to read it. The Marvel saga, and the Stan & Jack saga are regular subjects of conversation among my cartoonist friends and I, as I’m sure they are with many of you reading this.

A number of us were reading this 160-page epic, and when I finished it, I furiously wrote notes on my reactions, for the purpose of sharing my views on it with the aforementioned friends. I never got around to writing it up, and very recently, while preparing my “home office” for the “Stay Home” duration, I came upon my notes, and re-reading them, decided to transcribe them now, for whatever worth they may have for my friends, or any of you who may have read the book.

So here comes a comic-related post long enough to be worthy of my friend Mike Tiefenbacher. Roughly a YEAR ago, I wrote:

I loved Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I loved their WORK of course, but I also loved THEM—the way I love the Marx Brothers, the Termite Terrace directors, the Monkees, or any of my lifelong Pop Culture heroes.

Lee & Kirby contributed immeasurably to my life, both in the enjoyment of THEIR product, but also in the inspiration their work provided me in mine. And they did it primarily during the impressionable years of my childhood through the end of my teens, ensuring that I’d carry a lifetime torch for them. And while I can’t say I knew them personally, the times that I met them both, and was able to spend brief but “quality” time with them remain highlights of my life.

Of course, in the decades following my childhood and those later encounters the two of them I (like everyone else) would come to learn that the romance and excitement of “The Batty Bullpen” in the “House Of Ideas” was a myth. Abbott & Costello weren’t friends in real life. Dean hated Jerry. Lee & Kirby weren’t really “Smilin’ Stan & “Jolly Jack”…

I just finished reading Jon Morrow’s much-anticipated (and HIGHLY recommended) “Lee & Kirby: STUF’ SAID!”

In spite of my rabid desire to read it, it took me a while, because I read in chunks or sections commuting to & from work, VS all in one huge burst, which I think served me as a reader, because the book’s greatest strength as History---its incredibly researched, chronological quoting from Lee & Kirby’s individual interviews in print---is also what makes it slightly difficult, in that by the time I finished it, I was rather sick of the “Voices” of BOTH of them—the relentless, repetitious accounts of the same events, the boastfulness, the self-serving claims of ownership, and the willful ignorance of each diminishing the other’s importance…

Stan’s by-now all-too-familiar simultaneously self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing narrative—the charming, smooth-talking huckster, “working the room” all too successfully—the master of words using them all to his benefit, and Kirby’s equally self-promoting monologues, spoken in a voice that seems to be trying out the English language for the first time, or at best sounds like someone for whom English is their 2nd language.

Listening to them both makes it obvious that their division of labor made perfect sense—Kirby’s actual speech had a whacked-out quality about it that sounds like his oddball “Fourth World” characters speaking, but speech didn’t NEED to be his strength. VISUALS were his language, and he was second-to-none in that. His “writing” was in his story telling.
But THAT needed and hugely benefitted from Lee’s voice, and the frosting of Stan’s dialogue on the cake of Jack’s art is what MADE the “Marvel Age Of Comics” (at least for me).

Dismissing Lee’s contribution, even if you buy Kirby’s suggestion/claims that Stan played NO PART in plots (as both Jack and Roz do), marginalizing and falsely diminishing Lee’s role as simply “Adding the blurbs afterwards”, you’re really discounting a HUGE (and I’d say ESSENTIAL) component of Marvel’s appeal.

Jack Kirby is now generally viewed as a victimized martyr (VS a guy who didn’t move on from a job he disliked, like your plumber brother-in-law would do). But Kirby’s claims and self-aggrandizing, read here in bulk, can be just as annoying as Lee’s, it’s just that Lee’s went on longer, and were more ubiquitous, to the point that he was seen fairly universally as an operator, but just READ the Kirby quotes, and it’s obvious that in their own way they can be just as vain and dishonest as Lee’s.

You might quickly say that Jack was justified in going overboard in HIS claims in order to counteract Stan and HIS, but when you were a kid, your Mom didn’t accept “But he STARTED it!” as a defense for bad behavior directed at your sibling, and I don’t think that excuse should be afforded Kirby for committing the same sins of commission and omission that Lee does…

Ultimately I think, their problem boiled down to their different definitions of “Writing” or “Writer”, and “Script” or “Scripter”. The Rosetta Stone for me finally “getting” Kirby’s views was his 70th birthday 1987 radio interview with Warren Reece & Max Schmid on “Earthwatch” (WBAI, NYC). It’s on YouTube, and it’s very enlightening on their dynamic.

If only Lee had run credits like “Plotted by Kirby & Lee” (occasionally minus ‘Lee’, where the situation applied), or “Illustrated by Kirby (or Ditko)—Dialogue by Lee”, Kirby and Ditko might have been happy (well, maybe not DITKO), and the whole mess might have been avoided.

Obviously other “Bullpen” artists (Romita and Colan, for two examples) had much less problem with the arrangement (and seemingly Lee DID give them more plot), but ultimately only Ditko and Kirby had enough of a problem with the “Marvel Method” to walk and injure Marvel (if not in sales, in reputation) in the process. (Some might add WOOD, but I wouldn’t).

In the end, the work’s the work, and it still stands. At least we’re fortunate that the behind-the-scenes unhappiness or discord seemingly didn’t detract from what they gave us, the readers… you might argue that Ditko’d have stayed longer, but then we wouldn’t have gotten Johnny Romita’s Spidey, and did we need more than 100 Lee-Kirby FFs? (Still, we might’ve gotten a coherent Marvel “Fourth World”…)

I personally have learned about myself that I have no “casual interests”, so if I love something, I generally want to know ALL about it. Unfortunately learning that “all” can be very enjoyable, but more often than not I find the reality is sad.

Still---you gotta read “STUF’ SAID!”.

Not-So-Smilin' Stan & Not-So-Jolly Jack : Reviewing STUF' SAID!