Here’s an interview with John Romita where he explicitly says that Kirby did layouts for his first two issues of Daredevil.

www.tcj.com/an-interview-with-john-romita-by-tom-spurgeon/

Daredevil #1 is a very interesting case. I think most fans of our era were like me, assuming that Stan had provided detailed plots that covered all the critical elements, the order of events, the significant character elements. That assumption colored our reading of the stories, so we often were blinded to the differences between the art and the story. A close examination of Daredevil #1 makes at least one thing really obvious to me, once I free myself from making any assumptions about what Bill Everett was working from:

There was no radioactive waste giving Matt Murdock super-senses in what Bill Everett turned in.

Everett was a experienced comics craftsman, and if the plot we might presume he was working from had a scene where a cylinder tumbled from a van and struck him in the face, he would have drawn just that, not a fully closed van striking a boy. There's no artistic justification for not depicting the waste coming out of the van and erupting near young Matt. Everett, in my studied opinion, drew a story where a laundry van hit the boy, injuring him and causing blindness. Stan, in the script, added awkward dialog to cover this information, and slapped an unlikely label on the van itself. It didn't strike readers as suspicious that Everett failed to adequately illustrate this key moment, because we assumed that was in the plot he was given.



Later, the depiction of Matt navigating an office using "pings" seems to my eyes to be showing him using an electronic device in the cane, not innate enhanced senses. Again, the script plasters over this, so the reader doesn't notice that Everett is showing Matt walking with the crook of the cane pointing ahead of him (clearly unlike a blind person would use his cane!) to aim the "pings" he is using for echolocation:



One is certainly welcome to argue that the super-powers were an improvement that gave the character a shot at being the superstar he would eventually become, rather than a mundane adventurer who would likely have been one of Marvel's early flops--I would in fact agree. But if I'm correct, we have to assume that either Everett failed to draw what he was directed to draw, or that he intentionally drew something different than he was directed because he disagreed with it, or that he was never told that this character was supposed to get superpowers from radioactive material at all.

I favor the latter explanation. And if Everett didn't have what we now consider to be a key element of the Daredevil concept, it calls into question our (or my, anyway) assumption that Stan Lee was generating these complicated ideas, then farming them out to be rendered by artists before being scripted by him. And once we allow ourselves to question that assumption, we are left to wonder just how many of the initial ideas Stan provided for Everett to work from?

Was the basic concept all there except for the notion that Matt got enhanced senses, so Stan added that "in post"?

Or was it "Bill, we are going to take over the old 'Daredevil' trademark. Work me up a story about an acrobatic hero we can use that name for. Make him kind of like the guy from the old Lev Gleason book, but different. I can't wait to see what you come up with."

Or was it somewhere in between?

I happen to think it was a lot closer to the latter extreme than the first: Bill Everett came up with a story and character, inspired by his own daughter's legal blindness, and Stan refined the concept to include the super-senses. 

That's certainly an interesting possibility. I have always thought that the artwork did a really poor job of what Stan's dialogue was telling us had happened, so you might well be right.





This, however, I just don't see at all.

Don't forget, that when Everett and Lee where developing the character, prior to working on issue #1, it was Everett who came up with the idea of Daredevil being blind, inspired by his own daughter who was visually impaired. It was Stan, however, who came up with the idea of Daredevil having a radar-sense (I've read that he was worried that the concept of heightened abilities might offend some blind people). Given that the concept of this new Daredevil being blind and having a radar-sense were in place before work started on that first issue, I find it improbable that Everett was drawing Matt Murdock getting about via an electronic gizmo in his cane. Besides, as I say, I just don't see that in the artwork you posted.

I'm sure I've read that the Negative Zone was Kirby's thing and that he originated it precisely so that he could incorporate collage and interstellar photographs into the artwork, which he sort of did. Can't remember where I read this though.

Critically, New Gods was praised when it came out. It's just been 50 years of True Believers telling people it wasn't any good that have tainted people's perception - mainly the one's who haven't read it. The fact is, New Gods is some of the best work Kirby ever did and at least three or four of those stories are some of the greatest stories he ever did. There's nothing wrong with his dialogue that's any different that what anyone else was doing in 1970-1975 - including how Luke Cage spoke or the way anyone younger spoke in Marvel B&W magazine's of the day. In fact, I cringe MORE when I read that Spider-man page from earlier in the thread with Stan's 'realistic' dialogue (lol).

New Gods and Fourth World tpb's still sell regularly and come back in print ever couple of years because more and more people are discovering it and realizing Kirby was ahead of his time. He was editing, writing and drawing 4 books every two months covering dozens of characters in creating an entire new universe. NOBODY was doing that at the time or had ever before. 

I don't know why the Fourth world books failed. It was Kirby's ultimate masterpiece, I'm thinking maybe the Bi-monthly status affected it. As for Star Wars, many non comic fans bought the book