Having read chunks of this, I did appreciate a lot of the ideas included... and, yes, I did find some of them "TOO" off-the-wall.

Congrats on the book Tolworthy! I haven't always agreed with your theories, but I do love to read them... they're always well considered and thought provoking.

Congratulations on the publication of your book, Tolworthy. It's a subject I find fascinating and I look forward to reading it, whether or not I agree with your conclusions in each and every case.

I got my print copy in the mail today and I'm really digging it! Most of the deductions I've gotten to so far have either aligned with my own theories or have been refreshingly plausible or entirely convincing. Glad to have a print copy of this excellent detective work!

Just ordered, looking forward to digging into it!

You are cherry picking Mr. Tolworthy's writing and ignoring other points relevant to the first FF. I don't see this is as a "Stan did nothing" situation either. He clearly did plenty, very obviously "ushered in the Marvel Universe", albeit through his editorializing and promotional ways. The real takeaway in Tolworthy's writing should be that it is Jack Kirby's ideas and concepts that are all there in the art and storytelling, which were simplified and altered, at times egregiously so, by Stan Lee. Who, from what I've seen plenty of times from various "Bullpen Bulletins" and lettercols, is the guy that told readers that he respected their intelligence. Yet, as Tolworthy points out, right there in that first issue, Lee has Reed Richards call a seismograph a "radar machine". And those kinds of errors don't stop there. The worst, even remotely comparable example I can think of from Kirby, within FF, is including the Thing at the start of a (much later) issue when he wasn't even with the rest of the group at the end of the previous installment. And Lee didn't even try to write around that, now that I think about it. But I digress.

Even if this had been a different concept at first from Kirby, can you truly say that Lee "changed it" into the Fantastic Four? Do any of us really know that? It's a fact that Kirby had a history of making comics starring kid gangs, generally if not always with about four members, in various premises and settings. If anything, the Fantastic Four can be seen as a more grown up variation on that same theme.

For the record, having read his book, I don't completely buy much of Tolworthy's theorizing about how the first story came together, and find a fair amount of his other "lost" Kirby story ideas to be quite a reach, if not still intriguing, particularly with strong evidence to back up his observations (eg. the lost Dr. Doom origin). He himself says so within the book that he probably took some of his theories too far, that it's pretty much up to the reader to decide what may or may not be true. For FF #1, I can see how it may have begun as a one-off story for one of the anthologies, of a man and two young assistants without any super powers, with no Thing, that got reworked into the fuller story we all know today. But history has obscured this possibility too much and retroscripting the story as it is can't really verify, just provide imaginative theories. What I do value in Tolworthy's writing are the points he makes, such as what is visible in Kirby's artwork and storytelling, the context of the time these stories were made in (and how observant and knowledgeable Kirby himself was in what he put into his stories) and how much of that is or isn't reflected in the finalized versions under Stan Lee's scripting and editing.

It probably helps that I'm not a fan from back then, but a 30 year old guy who only just started looking at these particular comics about 2 years ago, having liked and enjoyed various superhero properties and junk, Marvel characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men particularly, as a kid. I've maintained an affection towards comics that has only really blossomed as of late. I am clearly not old enough to have any nostalgia for the original 60s comics, or much of anything from the 20th century beyond adaptational versions of those old comics (movies, cartoons, etc.). I am coming to them as fresh as can be and l am always considering alternatives to the accepted and frequently repeated viewpoints about Lee and Kirby, or any other major figure in this medium's history as well.