Thanks for the kind words! Sorry for the delay in responding - busy week. Trying to hang an external door on a porch I'm building. I've never done either before, and this song pretty much sums it up.


Good point, thanks for spotting that. I've added a footnote where I discuss it in more detail.  I wonder if this an early example of Kirby's developing style? The switch from four fins per segment to two is very helpful in emphasising perspective, and that was something Kirby commonly did in later years: stretched anatomy, etc to show extreme 3D (with four fins the final image on page 7 would not have been as clear). What I REALLY want to do is write a much longer book on Kirby as a writer, and why he made the decisions he did. But that would take years, and I have only read a fraction of his work. But it seems to me that Kirby is going for heightened realism - the things that matter were very important to him, and the things that don't matter were sacrificed accordingly.



I love his interviews. I find his "sidetracks" are the best: when he appears to go off topic, but years later you realise "that explains everything!" Frustratingly, that is when the interviewer (or Roz) generally cuts him off and pulls him back to the less interesting question the interviewer had.

For example, in the earlier interviews when people asked about the origins of the FF he would immediately start talking about other characters as well, and how he was just throwing anything against the wall to see what stuck. Te interviewer of course wants a detailed step by step explanation of this particular issue of a comic. Looking back we see them as magical billion dollar properties. We imagine a sacred, slow and deliberate preparation taking months, or maybe a flash of cosmic inspiration. But no, the same month that Kirby produced the FF he produced five other books. Kirby was averaging six pages a day, when six pages was often a complete story! And the FF started out as just one more six page story.

Somehow it was decided at the last minute to make it into its own book. As an ignorant reader I thought "that was a big deal, why don't they remember?" but then I realised that last minute changes were so common that nobody would remember just one more. Michael Vassallo points out that when the 1957 crash came they were shipping 85 comic titles. 85!!!! Sure, that crashed to just 8 (8 physical titles per month, or 13 or so when we recall that some were bimonthly) but clearly that came from a period when new comics were launched and old ones cancelled about every week.

What Kirby remembers is the feeling or urgency - if he didnt make some hits then everybody would lose their job. He also remembers thinking a lot about radiation: he was reading the science magazines, and this was the height of the cold war, they'd just had the first atomic arms treaty, the Van allen belts had just been discovered, with the historic phrase "space is radioactive!" and they were talking about exploding a hydrogen bomb in space (which they did, in 1962), and Life magazine was running articles on DNA (the Noble prize for discovering the structure of DNA would be 1962). And Kirby remembers Ben Grimm losing everything, changing from hero to lonely outcast - a fear everyone could relate too in such uncertain times. But beyond that Kirby's mind must have been so full of the next day's story.  And I'm glad it was. (Hoping to get the Monsterbus book(s) for Christmas  )

I was going to make this a new thread, but I'm remarkably shy, so will just hide it here:

New blog: Kirby The Prophet

The book (the subject of this thread) was originally intended as just an introduction to the book I REALLY wanted to write, about Kirby as a writer. But that project is so big that, realistically I will never get it done. So I turned the intro into its own book. But I'm never happy with what I create, and in the case of the book it misses the point: that Kirby is just an amazingly great writer. In my view. Possibly the greatest writer who ever lived. I mean, 600 million sales (2000 books averaging 300,000 each), a much greater variety than anyone else in that class; and each one of his books has enough depth and richness to easily expand into a full length novel. I don't think that even Kirby's greatest fans appreciate just how many layers are in his writing. Well anyway, I really struggle in how to get across how much I love his plots, his details, and yes, his dialog.

So rather than start another book that would never be finished (and if finished would likely be unreadable) I decided to take the easy way out: a blog. Whenever I read a Kirby book I want to talk about it, so I will do just that. However, I could easily spend a whole day and write fifty pages on each issue, and I don't have unlimited time. So I decided to focus on just one tiny aspect of Kirby's writing: his predictions of the future that came true.

This is how the blog works: At the end of each day, if I have time, I read a Kirby book and then write down my thoughts about "the world that's coming". Then I hit post and go to sleep. For time reasons the blog has no pictures, and is unapologetically dense (possibly in more ways than one!) It will only work if it's quick to create, and that means not spending any time explaining or defending ideas. It's the hardest of hardcore, so it's not for everyone. Occasionally I can't help just talking about how I love his stuff (like the latest post) but as far as possible I will try to stay on topic.

The blog is new, it only has ten or so entries so far, but as long as long as I keep it simple I'm sure I can keep it up indefinitely. There might be gaps of weeks or even months, but generally whenever I get time to read I will try to blog.

I'm starting with OMAC, then on to Eternals, then probably Kamandi, then Captain Victory, and just keep going with whatever grabs my interest. I want to cover his romance and crime comics as well, because prophecy is really about eternal patterns, not just specific future events.

Well there it is.


kirbytheprophet.blogspot.co.uk/

PS version three of the "Case for Kirby" book is under way, but it's mostly a lot of minor fixes in response to feedback. I'll wait until corrections stop coming in before uploading the "final" version, so don't hold your breath.

Three remarks:

• I wouldn't call Stan evil, in any case. I would simply say that his energy was where he really made a difference (marketing).
• Millions may like the end product, but we don't know how much they would've liked it, with a different writing contribution.
• If democracy could defeat any kind of logic, the "millions of flies can't be wrong" argument, should rule.

In essence, I liked the original title better.

Oh, and one more:

* To imply similarities between Fantastic Four and Challengers of the Unknown, you use a weird version of F.F. #1 that has been deliberately recolored to match the Challengers artwork. (You can look on YouTube and see videos of people flipping through original copies of F.F. #1, so it's easy to prove that the shots you use are wrong.)

Please give tolworthy’s work the benefit of the doubt! It is a remarkable piece of detective work!

I, too, started reading the piece thinking that tolworthy was way too protective of Kirby, way too harsh on Lee, and probably a member of that group for whom the King can do no wrong and Lee is an absolute hack. But that’s not what reading the thing in its entirety left me with as an overall impression.

I believe that a large part of the evidence provided does demonstrate that FF#1 is first and foremost Kirby’s work, with Lee adding little original. I don’t agree with everything, but I do see how the evidence is pretty convincing overall. You’re right, when trying to make a point we often use whatever fact fits our narrative. Some of the points made in the essay seem be overstretching things a little. But so what? There are far more very convincing points in there, and overall they make a solid case.

That doesn’t mean Lee couldn’t write, and I, for one, am sure that his over the top and flamboyant prose contributed a lot to the burgeoning Marvel universe. (By contrast, I never much cared for Kirby’s own dialogues, for all that they could at time be amusing). But did he come up with the Fantastic Four? Did he plot that first issue? I now doubt it.

My short take after reading the entire article: I’ll admit that it is meticulously researched, because you would have to do a lot of research to take any minor discrepancy and blow it up into an example of genius on Jack Kirby’s part and ineptitude on Stan Lee’s part.

Here’s a perfect example: F.F. #1 opens with a smoke cloud containing the words “THE FANTASTIC FOUR!”, as a signal to the other members that Reed needs them. Stan Lee’s dialog says that it’s a flare gun, and the words appear “as if by magic”. The author then spends three pages explaining that it’s probably actually sky projection technology, where words are projected onto the cloud of smoke in the air. He also says that modern projectors can use lasers (complete with a video from YouTube), and Laser were first invented in 1961, so it’s possible that’s what Kirby had intended. But when Stan Lee called it a “flare gun”, he implied some new, wondrous technology that didn’t exist at the time. The conclusion: Kirby created a story that could happen in the real world, while Lee added narration to make it unrealistic.

Never mind that sky projection is only used at night, not during the day.
Never mind that laser projection technology did not exist at that time (and it’s a huge leap to say, “Lasers were invented that year, and laser projection exists now, so it must have existed at the time”).
Never mind that it makes no logical sense for Reed to have a gun that fires smoke, and a completely separate projection system in a different location, just to send out a signal.
Never mind that there is absolutely NOTHING in the artwork to imply that any sort of projection system was used.
Never mind that this all rests on the belief that readers would be pulled out of the story by “magical flare gun technology” in a universe with flying cars and superheroes.

No, the most important thing is for the author to discredit Stan Lee at every turn and claim that he “dumbed down” Kirby’s story, so the author jumps through hoops to make up an entire backstory about how Kirby maybe possibly could have meant some technology that actually existed at the time, when Occam’s Razor says that he probably drew a gun that shoots the words in the sky because he wanted to show a gun that shoots the words in the sky.

And the entire paper goes on like that. You can never have Kirby drawing something that’s a little off; it’s always evidence that someone forced him to make a change. Any story ideas are given to Kirby, because Kirby wrote one story ten years earlier that had one tiny thing that was similar. Whole imagined storylines are created out of whole cloth, based on absolutely no evidence, and used to prove that Stan Lee dumbed down the comic because his dialog doesn’t match. And if the quality of Kirby’s stories ever goes down, it’s because Stan Lee wasn’t paying him enough.

I could go into detail about the numerous logical and inferential errors, but it would probably be as long as the paper itself.