Liar, Liar

 Presented as the alternative to decades of propaganda.

As I predicted long ago, with the death of the corporate shill known as Stan Lee, the truth about his career in comics is coming out at a more rapid pace than when he was still breathing. But while it's easier to get the word out concerning his moral crimes, it's no easier to deal with his fans when one is telling the truth about him.

I can only describe his fan base as religious fanatics. They have been fed a line about his divinity and if you challenge this line you are at risk of the same kind of attack you would expect from a crazed fundamentalist, or from a rabid animal. When you tell what really happened at Marvel after Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko transformed the publisher from a faltering outfit into a tremendous success the Liar's true believers will descend on you with knives out.

Here, then, are the basic truths:

What we know of today as the Marvel Universe was created mainly by Jack Kirby. To a lesser extent it was also given commercial success by Steve Ditko. There were additional contributors such as Bill Everett, Wally Wood, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, and others; but the mass of the modern fables emerged from the minds and talents of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

The big liar we call Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber) was the editor for the comics arm of a publishing company started by Martin Goodman. Lee was cousin-by-marriage to Goodman, so his installation into the company was an act of pure nepotism. No talent was involved, and no meritocracy was at work. A relative was shown the ropes and was provided with a steady paycheck at a very young age. Lee's lack of talent is obvious in that he never left the employ of his relative and stayed there over the years, never venturing forth to find gainful employment elsewhere, and never proving himself as anyone valuable enough for a head hunter to come calling. It's often said that Lee was a good salesman, but I always found him to be on a level with a scamming used car salesman. His personality was odious, at best.

But what service did he provide for Martin Goodman? After Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were allowed to create new titles to cash in on the superhero craze of the early 1960s, Goodman needed a salaried employee whose name could be attached to the intellectual property to cement the company's claim to that property. And, as the only salaried employee at the comics arm of Martin Goodman's corporation, Lee fit the bill.

So: the liar's name went on every book as writer. Later, Lee claimed to have created all of the titles and characters at the early Marvel Comics. He claimed to have created the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, the Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, the Mighty Thor, Dr. Strange, the Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man, Giant Man, Ant Man, etc. In fact, though, there is zero evidence that Lee invented any of the characters which he claimed to be writing. Also, there are credible claims that he wasn't even writing the parade of successful books appearing from the likes of Kirby, Ditko, Ayers, Wood, Everett, Heck, Romita, and company. Keep in mind that before the explosion of creativity provided from Kirby and Ditko, Goodman's most profitable enterprise was publishing a line of men's adventure fiction magazines. There was a  constant parade of talented writers in and out of the  building who were only too happy to expand dialog already provided  by the artists who were actually not only creating the characters, but plotting and writing them. For a couple of hours work these ghost-writers could earn grocery money. No big deal that another man's name went on. For in those days comic scripting was held in lower esteem than even the pulp fiction they were producing for Martin Goodman. Who cared if a no-talent bum put his signature to it?

Over the following months and years as Marvel's fortunes expanded Goodman sought to sell the company. I can imagine what he was thinking. He'd already seen his comic book business go through a boom and bust cycle from the early 1940s and through the 1950s, and he could have figured he was riding another wave that might soon crest and fall. He wanted to get out while the company was a ripe crop ready to be harvested and sold. Therefore, more than ever he needed a corporate shill that enabled him to claim ownership of the intellectual property that rightly resided with the men who had sweated it out: mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. For that purpose alone, Lee's lying presence was invaluable.

Eventually, Goodman did sell Marvel. For enough cash so that he was able to retire to Florida as a wealthy man. What he never considered was that the value of Jack Kirby's creations was far more than he ever could have dreamed. The publisher never figured that his connivance with Liar Lee was a theft that would someday be measured in tens of billions of dollars. I cannot think of another theft of intellectual property that rivals what was stolen from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. The monetary value of the likes of X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, Dr. Strange, etc. staggers the imagination. And as that wealth has increased, so did the lies of the man whose professional existence was provided for that sole purpose. And also continued the willingness for the various corporate owners to go along--they still needed that lie to live on.

In fact, though, we all know who created the characters. Kirby, Ditko, Everett, and others did. Who wrote the books? The artists who illustrated it were expected to plot and also write them. The editor placed his name on the credits page as "writer" when there is zero evidence he ever wrote anything other than poorly rendered promotional blurbs and columns, and an occasional butchering of dialog and scripts in some issues. The corporations claimed ownership for everything because of the existence of a sole salaried employee.

Today, as I said, the truth is emerging. We now know who created the characters and wrote and illustrated the stories. It wasn't the lying editor.

But telling this simple truth can still be a tough row to hoe. One has to deal with the army of zealots who believe the fallacy that a slimy grifter created the characters they love. These fans equate the face of a gleaming, grinning slug with their beloved comics. And there are the professional sellouts working in the comics industry who still feel the urge to kiss corporate ass after the lying bastard they once worked for is dead and rotting. Hopefully, these prostitutes will come to their senses and find enough dignity to stop lying for a dead thief and the corporate master he served. Maybe that will happen. But I doubt it.

ACCORDING TO JACK KIRBY by Michael Hill. Highly recommended.

The Amazing Spider-Man. Created by, plotted by, written by, penciled by, inked by Steve Ditko.

A Vanishing American Art Form

This week I read articles about plummeting sales at Marvel Comics Group (part of Disney). Some people (including some Marvel editors) were blaming the recent attempt to "diversify" the characters by reinterpreting old standbys and new creations as racially, ethnically, gender, and sexually inclusive. Apparently this editorial move coincided with vanishing sales.

But the editors and comic reporters got it wrong. They are right in that the comic book--one of the true American art forms--is dying out. But they missed the reason for it. Comics are dying out because the industry abandoned the kind of diversity that matters--comics that cater to all kinds of tastes.

The HUGE problem with "mainstream" comics is that they aren't mainstream. They are dominated by silly superhero comics. Now, don't get me wrong. To paraphrase Paul McCartney, I love silly superhero comics. I love them so much that I even wrote a superhero novel. I would like to write more of them. Superhero comics have their place. They should probably be a part of the comics publishing business. But they shouldn't be 99% of it! Imagine, for instance, you went into a library or bookstore and 99 out of 100 of the books in it were about superheroes. 

Comics by their nature tend to tilt toward genre fiction, but there was a time when there was every kind of comic book you could imagine selling in huge numbers. Comic books about policemen, criminals, sports figures, animals, history, military, funny animals, humor, teenagers, romance, horror, science-fiction, fantasy, classic fiction, westerns, movie adaptation, trains, cars, etc. etc. etc.

Superheroes came along and began to overwhelm the industry when first DC, and then Jack Kirby (at Marvel, the company that Kirby built) brought them back. They kicked Donald Duck and Richie Rich and Classics Illustrated and everything else to the gutter and have run roughshod over the comic book publishing business ever since.

Enough.

Either the industry finds a way to start selling all kinds of comics to the public, or they fade away and go extinct. A variety of types of comics that appeals to a huge and varied audience is what will save the industry. Not some whining liberal's version of "diversity".

Jack Kirby, the man who created Marvel Comics (and who could create and write and illustrate any kind of comic) was ironically responsible principally for the dominance of the superhero genre that has overwhelmed comic book publishing since 1961.

 And here is but a taste of the kinds of comic books that the superhero genre has overwhelmed and crushed. Gone, now, from the newsstands. Absent from the book shops. Vanished even from the comic book specialty stores. Unless the industry can somehow bring back this kind of variety, the business and art form will soon become extinct. (Scroll down.)

These barely scratch the surface of variety that people used to see when approaching a newsstand where comics were on display. No wonder the market is vanishing.

MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1

Normally I don't buy extra copies of books that I already have in my collection. However, sometimes I will if two qualities present themselves: a very low price and nicer condition than what I already own. These two things came together this week when I happened upon a copy of MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1 from Charlton Comics.

I got this book for obvious reasons. It features stories created by, written by, illustrated by, and inked by Steve Ditko. Here we see The Question, one of his creations that has been almost as long-lived as either Spider-Man or Dr. Strange. He created The Question after he walked away from Marvel Comics and was making his living away from the thieving influence of Stan Lee and Martin Goodman.

I'm not sure who did the dialog in this book, but it's credited to "D.C. Glanzman" who was, apparently, a real person, but it has also been said that Ditko would sometimes use the name when doing his own dialog. As with most of Ditko's work, the dogma is laid on pretty thick. So I suspect that the words in those balloons are at least 50% Ditko...perhaps 100%. It's certainly a lot different from the silly dialog that was present in Spider-Man, so my suspicion is that someone was following Ditko's notes closely--if it wasn't Ditko himself. When I was younger I thought that Lee had rewritten Ditko's dialog on Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. But these days I suspect that the dialog was mainly written by many of the pulp writers who were in the building working on Goodman's various pulp titles.

At any rate, I picked up a better-than-fine copy of the book. It may go permanently into my collection, or perhaps I'll sell it later and keep the lesser condition book.

A nicer condition copy of MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1, featuring THE QUESTION, created by Steve Ditko, plotted by Steve Ditko, penciled and inked by Steve Ditko. (But, alas, copyright by DC Comics.)

The Truth

The multi-billion dollar industry that we now know as "the Marvel Universe" was mainly created by one man.

Jack Kirby created it.

Jack Kirby wrote it.

Jack Kirby illustrated it.

He had no "co-creator". Just a meddling editor who lied in his position as company shill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Kirby's comic book alter ego, Ben Grimm.

The Creator: Jack Kirby.

STRANGE TALES #103

My latest pick up for my comic collection. This one's great for several reasons. It fills a gap in my run of Strange Tales, it's a Jack Kirby book, and it also has a Steve Ditko story! So I'll go through this one and pretend I'm an eight-year-old kid again, discovering the world of comics created by Kirby and Ditko! This copy is nice. It has some classic 'Marvel chipping', but is otherwise in decent shape. Marvel books during this period were notorious for having low-quality cover stock that is susceptible to chipping along the leading edges. I can live with it.

My copy of STRANGE TALES #103.

My Two Favorite Comic Stories

As a kid, I loved superhero comics. As an adult...not so much. Except, of course, in the realm of nostalgia. I still adore those comic stories that inspired and fascinated me as a kid and enjoy looking at them through the lens of decades of history.

My two favorite superhero comic book yarns were written and illustrated by (of course) my two favorite creators of that period of my life: Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. I won't get too much into the history of the pair of stories that so influenced me, except to reiterate that Steve Ditko created, wrote, and illustrated The Amazing Spider-Man; and Jack Kirby created, wrote, and illustrated the Fantastic Four. Neither man had a "co-creator"--just an editor.

I've also covered both of these stories in past essays here in my blog. So I'll just list the stories and the issues in which they appeared and leave my earlier words to stand; and perhaps add some depth to those essays on another day.

The first of these great stories was the Master Planner story arc that ran for several issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the finest super-hero story ever done. Ditko outdid not only himself with this adventure, but all other super-hero comic creators before or since. A few have come close to capturing the depth and breadth of what he was achieving, but no one has surpassed the sheer power of this tale.

When he was allowed, Ditko could create some of the finest covers being done in comics.

Yeah, the fans had never seen Spider-Man done like this.

Despair was never portrayed quite like this. Someday I need to do a study of the way Ditko utilized the imagery of water in his comics.

Years later, after Ditko had left his employment at Marvel Comics and abandoned his amazing creations there, his former colleague was winding down his own tenure at that company. Jack Kirby pretty much created not only most of the characters at Marvel, but the company itself. No one else was as important to that company as Jack Kirby. I have studied his run on his most popular title there, FANTASTIC FOUR, and always noticed that he seemed to let up on the gas after the "Him" storyline in issues 66 & 67. Further research led me to the conclusion that his editor there had wrecked his story, almost completely nullifying its effectiveness and mucking up the dialog pretty much beyond belief. Thereafter, the explosion of creativity that Kirby had lavished on the book to that point ceased. The stories were still excellent and the art was still the most dynamic around, but there were almost no new characters coming out of the book. Kirby was, I am convinced, fed up with seeing the sweat of his brow being capitalized by his employers with nothing for him beyond his page rate. Further, not only was his intellectual property being robbed from him, his stories were often being mangled by the ego-mad idiot editor under whom he worked. Thus, the flow of new properties to his bosses slowed to a trickle.

Then, in issue #90 of the title, a new story arc appeared. The Skrull/Slave arc. It could be argued that the plot was partially based on the germ of an idea from the TV series Star Trek. But beyond that it was all classic Kirby. Kirby had always been fascinated by mob characters and science fiction. And so he plunged his comic book alter-ego, Ben Grimm, into a long story steeped in mob culture and a pure science-fiction, planet-spanning adventure. It was, I now know, Kirby's fond farewell to his character of Ben Grimm as he planned his move away from Marvel and to fields greener for his creative energies.

Symbolism. One of Kirby's earliest creations for Marvel was the alien race, the Skrulls, who were shape-shifters. Here, he is tricked and kidnapped by a Skrull posing as his friend, Reed Richards. Fooled again, sucker!

Ben Grimm, in chains!

One of the most effective and dramatic covers I've seen in superhero comics.

The finale. Torgo was the major character (I can't say "villain" because he truly was not such) that Kirby created for this story arc. However, for all the emotional power of Torgo, Kirby chose to give him a kind of generic android appearance similar to the kind of thing he'd been handing off to his employers since issue #68 of the title. Let them create their OWN unique images to exploit!

Comic Collection Additions.

I haven't had much time to devote to my comic collecting hobby lately. In fact, I've had quite a dry period for that because of my workload. I've been way too busy to work on the collection very much.

But I have picked up a couple of comics recently.

Adding to my early Marvel collection I grabbed a copy of STRANGE TALES #112. Jack Kirby cover. One of my pals has made the pitch that if the cover for these early superhero stories was by Kirby, then he likely did the plot also. He'd hand in the art for the cover along with the plot. Of course the plot would later be credited to a certain asshole editor who wrote nothing and created nothing and who slapped his name on everything to pad his paycheck and to ensure that the company retained copyright.

This issue has a story illustrated by Dick Ayers. When I was a kid I never liked any of the Human Torch stories that Ayers illustrated. There was something in those days that I found crude about his art style and I always found it an effort to read any story that he illustrated. Of course now I have a greater appreciation for him, but there's always that nagging memory of my childhood feelings coloring my opinion of his work.

The story dialog is credited to someone named "Joe Carter". I didn't know who this was, so I asked around on the Internet about him, and was informed that Mr. Carter was, in fact, Jerry Siegel, one half of the creative team who gave us Superman. In the early 60s he was still writing for the industry and he did the dialog on a number of these Human Torch yarns.

There's also a good Steve Ditko science-fiction story in the mix. All through the first few years of the superhero renaissance at Marvel there was a backlog of science-fiction and monster stories written and illustrated by the likes of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Paul Reinman, and the rest of the Marvel bullpen in those days. So Marvel would pad the issues out with these unpublished stories that had already been commissioned and paid for. It's actually for these monster stories mainly by Kirby and Ditko that I started collecting comics again.

STRANGE TALES #112.

Another book that I picked up was an EC. I don't focus on collecting Golden Age comics, but I do enjoy buying EC books now and again. I've bought a number of them this year, and this one was a real find. It's in decent shape and is currently the oldest EC comic that I own, published in 1950. It's #16, but is in reality #2 of the title. It used the numbering from a previous title and after #17 the numbering started with #4. So there are actually two "#15 through #17", which can be confusing.

Owning this book, I'm reminded why EC is considered as having the highest quality stories and artwork of any mainstream comic book publisher in the history of the format. I hope to keep buying ECs over the next few years.

HAUNT OF FEAR #16 (actually #2) with a great Johnny Craig cover.

It Sold for HOW MUCH?!

Some years back, when I got out of the comic book retailing business, I swore off the industry. I didn't even want to write for the comic book industry anymore, abandoning my nascent career in selling comic scripts to various publishers. I was completely burned out on the literary/art form.

Years passed. For a long time I didn't so much as crack the covers of a comic book or enter the doors of a comic book shop. If I passed by a rack of comics in any kind of retail establishment I tended to ignore them.

But, somewhere along the way, nostalgia began gnawing at the old bones. So I picked up a few low-grade copies of The Amazing Spider-Man created/written/penciled/inked by Steve Ditko. I got a kick out of the books (I think they were issues #16 and #19), so I figured, 'What the heck? I could probably buy all of the Ditko issues in low to mid-grade without too much trouble'. So, I set about doing that.

Then I decided that I wouldn't mind owning a lot of the pre-hero Marvel comics that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created together, and I started collecting those, too. And then, I decided to take a crack at buying a complete set of Fantastic Four, but only the issues created/written/penciled by Jack Kirby.

I was, of course, hooked again on comics. And I've been at it for some time, carefully assembling a collection of the titles that I want the most and having no desire whatsoever to again enter the business of retailing at any level. But one of the things that amazes me is that I got back into it buying lower grade copies of the books I grew up loving. That way I could actually handle and read the books without having to worry about risking my "investment". And I do read my old comics, unlike so many who just pursue it as a kind of pure investment strategy, seeking to keep them in as high a grade as is possible

But something really weird has happened in the past couple of years. And it's that lower grade copies of the Silver Age books that I have been buying have exploded in value. Books that I thought would never be in high demand are just that. People are paying crazy prices for the kinds of books that I would once never have considered selling for anything more than pennies.

It's a crazy world.

My copy of Strange Tales 89, the first appearance of Jack Kirby creation, Fin Fang Foom. Kirby really liked alliteration.

My copy of Kirby creation Fantastic Four #8.

My copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #1, created by Steve Ditko.

My copy of Strange Tales #114. Captain America returns! (Or does he?!)

FANTASTIC FOUR #8.

I landed a decent copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #8 for my Kirby collection. There are several things notable about this issue. One of which is how common it is as a back issue. From my general experience in my years as a dealer of collectible comics, it is far and away the single most common issue of the first ten issues of the title. When I was a dealer I was rarely without a copy. I attend comic conventions from time to time and just about every serious dealer of back issue comics seems to have at least one copy in stock.

I can't imagine why it's so common. Sometimes I wonder about the availability of certain back issues and the reasons for their relatively great numbers in current days. The bottom line is that these issues sold more than the issues immediately before and after and thus survived in greater amounts. Was it because more copies were distributed? Was it because there was something more appealing in the cover or in the story inside the book? I have no idea.

Issue #8 features a character who went on to become a long-running villain in the history of Kirby's tenure on the book: The Puppet Master (Phillip Masters). As his name indicates, he can control others through the manipulation of puppet likenesses that he constructs. What attached him inexorably to the heroes of the book is that he is the stepfather of Alicia Masters, the woman who became the love interest of Ben Grimm (aka The Thing).

Jack Kirby chose to show the Puppet Master as resembling a puppet himself, most notably Howdy Doody of TV fame. Perhaps it is this resemblance to that TV star that caused the book to sell so well that month, even though the TV show had been long cancelled by the time this issue appeared.

Kirby was still using as a major plot device the fact that Ben Grimm was a kind of loose cannon among the Fantastic Four, one to be feared. Kirby would also use a similar storyline in the Avengers with his other super-strength-endowed anti-hero, The Incredible Hulk. It was quite an effective device and although Kirby used it time and again in various issues of the FF he was able to keep the stories fresh enough so that it never became tired and predictable.

My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #8.

In these early issues Grimm would still make the transition from monster to human and back again on a relatively often basis.

We see just how powerful and how scary Grimm can be.

Kirby explains how the Human Torch's powers work.