The Inhumans: Part 2 - Stardom Beckons

THERE WAS NO PLAN FOR THE INHUMANS, at least not at first. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had introduced Madam Medusa - unheralded - as a member of the Fantastic Four foe group The Frightful Four. And for eight issues of the Fantastic Four comic - 36 (Mar 1965) to 43 (Oct 1965), Medusa haughtied her way through the stories, coldly collaborating with The Wizard and his team to bring about the defeat and/or demise of the Storm family.

Tea and antipathy - The Frightful Four's dislike of each other is obvious from the start. So why does Medusa hang out with a group of people she despises. In the end, Stan and Jack never really explained that.

While the other Frightfuls each had a clear motive for doing what they did - mostly being previous foes of Johnny (The Human Torch) Storm in numerous Strange Tales adventures - there was no such reasoning behind Medusa's enmity towards the FF. She was literally a character with no motivation. More importantly, Stan's scripts never even hinted that she had any reason whatsoever for fighting alongside The Wizard et al, something I discussed a little last time.

So when Marvel - still operating under DC honcho Jack Liebowitz's distribution constraints - was unable to add two new titles to the lineup - editor Stan Lee decided to include the concepts of The Black Panther and The Inhumans in the Fantastic Four adventures.

As the idea of a solo Inhumans comic wouldn't have been discussed and vetoed until the spring of 1965, I'm calculating that Stan would have told Jack that the characters had to be integrated into FF around June 1965 at the latest, when work on Fantastic Four 44 (Nov 1965) was beginning. Medusa first appeared in FF36 (Mar 65), which Kirby would have been drawing in August or September of 1964.

Folding The Inhumans into the Fantastic Four comic wasn't an especially easy task. Stan and Jack only had twenty pages a month to play with, so they could only devote three or four pages an issue to their new characters. They solved this by having Maximus create an impenetrable barrier around the home of the Inhumans, The Great Refuge, so that Johnny (The Human Torch) Storm would be separated from his Inhuman love-interest Crystal.

Back in Fantastic Four 48 (Mar 1966), we left The Inhumans trapped behind an impenetrable barrier created by mad Maximus' Atmos Gun ... no way in and no way out. This allows Stan and Jack to play out the drama of The Inhumans separately from the adventures of the FF, with only the slightest overlap ... at least for the time being. 

This plot device allowed Stan and Jack to use up the ideas that they'd formulated for The Inhumans solo comic, by playing out the Shakespearian twin dramas of Black Bolt and his royal family trying to find a way to escape while combatting the mad machinations of Maximus and showing us Johnny Storm's quest to be reunited with his lost love Crystal.

In FF54, the Human Torch takes some time out from his Fantastic-Fouring to set out with his football player pal Wyatt Wingfoot, in a borrowed Wakandan air-ship, to reach his lost love Crystal of the Inhumans.

Along the way, we follow Johnny Storm and his friend Wyatt Wingfoot as they try to breach the barrier and reach the Inhumans - first meeting Prester John, whose Evil Eye weapon may just hold the key to breaching the barrier, then later encounterng Lockjaw, the Inhumans' giant, dimension-hopping dog. But neither of these story-loops really advances the plot, entertaining as they are. So ultimately, Johnny's quest is unsuccessful.

Inside the barrier, Medusa and the other Inhumans try to convince crazy Maximus to use his technological knowledge to free them from the negative energy prison separating them from the outside world.

In the meantime, on the inside, Black Bolt, Medusa and the other Inhumans try to persuade the hopelessly insane Maximus to raise the barrier. And when that fails, Black Bolt takes matters into his own hands and uses the uncontrollable power of his own voice to shatter the barrier, releasing the Inhumans into our world.

And that pretty much runs from Fantastic Four 52 (Sep 1966) until Fantastic Four 61 (Apr 1967), when Crystal and Johnny are reunited. From that point on, their own drama concluded, The Inhumans are relegated to the role of guest stars in the Fantastic Four's comic. But they're pretty good guest stars.

The saga of The Inhumans coils its way through ten issues of the Fantastic Four comic, mostly in the background and unheralded on the majority of the covers, but it's a significant presence nonetheless. Once the political conflict between Black Bolt and Maximus is done, Stan and Jack seem uncertain where to take the characters next.

In Fantastic Four 62 (May 1967), after Reed Richards is accidentally launched into the Negative Zone - a mysterious region not unlike one of Doctor Strange's mystical dimensions and not be confused with the Negative Zone that surrounded the Inhuman's Great Refuge - Triton of The Inhumans comes to his aid.

In FF62, it's the Inhuman Triton who enters the Negative Zone in an attempt to rescue Reed Richards ... in all fairness, Stan could have chosen any number of characters. Was he just trying to keep The Inhumans on the readers' radar?

Triton hangs around long enough to help the FF battle Negative Zone escapee Blastaar and his new-found partner-in-crime The Sandman. But being that this is the Fantastic Four's comic, they finally manage to defeat their enemies on their own.

We all think Stan and Jack are giving us a bit of a rest from the Inhumans for a bit, but with the introduction of The Kree - an advanced alien race who visited Earth millennia before - we're being set up for further Inhumans back story and a lot more besides

Fantastic Four 64 (Jul 1967) introduces a new - but related - foe for the FF. With Crystal increasingly present in the Baxter Building, Reed, Sue and Ben take off for a short vacation, leaving Johnny in New York. And on a remote desert island they meet an ancient Sentry robot, left on Earth eons before by an advanced race called The Kree.

The Sentry is awakened when a couple of archeologists stumble across a Kree base. In a startling coincidence, the very same location in the South Pacific is selected by Reed, Sue and Ben for their vacation spot and pretty soon a difference of opinion breaks out, only ending when The Sentry is trapped in the collapsing Kree base. Except that's not actually the end of it. The FF's victory sets off a series of events as The Kree are alerted to the destruction of their property on Earth.

Looking back, it seems extremely odd that Stan and Jack thought it was unremarkable that Johnny and Ben slept in the same bed. Probably unlikely to happen in a 2019 comic book. More innocent times, perhaps. Elsewhere in the issue, The FF clash with a Kree prosecutor and win on appeal.

The rather strange opening of Fantastic Four 65 (Aug 1967) has all four having a common dream about the Supreme Intelligence, leader of the Kree. What they don't know that this is a harbinger of the approach of Ronan The Accuser, who aims to make the FF answer for destroying the Kree base. Not unnaturally, The Fantastic Four have other ideas and pin Ronan's ears back for him.

For the next couple of issues, The Inhumans would take a back seat while Stan and Jack give us Him and the Mystery of the Beehive. Only Crystal hanging around the Baxter Building reminds us that The Inhumans haven't gone away. And that leads us into Fantastic Four Annual 5 (Nov 1967) ...

For the preceding four years, the Fantastic Four Annuals had always been an event, featuring The Sub-Mariner, the Origin of Dr Doom, the wedding of Reed and Sue, and the return of the original Human Torch. To try to top that, Stan and Jack give us a team-up with The Black Panther and The Inhumans against a new villain, The Psycho Man.

Not one of my favourite Annuals from Marvel ... though it did have the announcement of Sue's pregnancy, a bunch of cool Inhumans pinups and the first Silver Surfer solo story to recommend it.

Unfortunately, the Psycho Man is a bit forgettable, and the involvement of the Inhumans doesn't really shed any light on their own story, simply serving to include the characters without any purpose beyond fighting alongside the FF. I kind of wonder if they were only in there to promote Jack Kirby's Inhuman origins series that began in Thor 146 the very same month ...

When Jack Kirby finally got his Inhumans solo series, it was stuffed in the back of Thor as a replacement for Tales of Asgard. The series would tell the story of the origin of the species in 

I'm not really sure what the purpose of switching "Tales of Asgard" out of Thor and bringing The Inhumans in. It's true that Stan had been promising Jack an Inhumans series for a couple of years, but something always seemed to get in the way and block it. It's also possible that Stan was concerned that Kirby not be overstretched, putting two major Marvel books - Fantastic Four and Thor - as well as the Captain America feature in Tales of Suspense, in jeopardy of running late. But the resulting compromise - seven episodes at five pages a month - wasn't much of a consolation prize.

Jack Kirby finally had his Inhumans solo series, but at five pages per episode, there wasn't really a decent amount of space to actually tell the full history of the characters.

The first couple of chapters tell of how The Kree initiated the Inhuman genetic experiment on Earth during the Paleolithic era. Then we jump forward to (almost) the present day and look at the individual Inhumans, beginning with Black Bolt ... or so we think. There's an interesting scene where we see Black Bolt as a baby, and the inevitable situation of the destruction caused when the child's super-powerful voice almost destroys the Inhumanas' city of Attilan.

This section is sort of interesting. The idea of a baby with a super-destructive voice would definitely present its parenting challenges, but other than that, there isn't anything else we don't already know. How much better might this have been if Jack had had 20 or 40 pages to explore the formative years of Black Bolt?

Then we jump forward to a 19-year-old Black Bolt and his first meeting with his cousins and his first run-in with his mental brother Maximus. It does seem a bit rushed, but with only five pages to play with, there's only so much exposition Stan and Jack can manage. They do, however, devote 15 pages to Triton, to round out the mini-series.In reality, the Triton segment is not the origin of the amphibian Inhuman, but rather the telling of Triton's foray into the world of men to discover how The Inhumans might be received, should their existence become known.

This is where the "Inhumans" series goes off-piste. Triton goes swim-about and stumbles across a film crew remaking Creature from the Black Lagoon. It's not terribly original (Kirby would revisit this idea in a later Fantastic Four) and it's certainly not an origin story. Note that, by this time, Triton had acquired magenta gloves and booties ... which is probably about as appropriate as giving a fish a bicycle.

Fifty years on, it's hard to know why the Inhumans mini-series lasted only seven episodes. I couldn't have been because Stan - or more likely, Jack - didn't know what to do with the characters. It does seem to me though that Stan's brief to Jack was "Origins of the Inhumans" - it says so, right there at the top of the series' splash pages - and Jack had other ideas. We know by this time, Stan and Jack would have only the briefest of discussions about forthcoming plots and Jack would draw out the story for Stan to dialogue. I suspect that when the last couple of episodes of the Triton segment came back, Stan must've thought, "Hang on a second. This isn't the origin of Triton." Did Stan pull the plug on the series at this point? Why didn't we get the origins of Gorgon and Karnak ... and more importantly, Madam Medusa? Who knows? But it would fit with the evidence that, by 1967, Jack was becoming a bit disgruntled with his lot at Marvel. 

I'm sure Vince Colletta has his fans, but I wouldn't count myself among them. I always felt the scratchy style didn't mesh well with Kirby's pencils. I'd much rather seen a different, perhaps more classical, inker on Thor ... John Severin, perhaps.

On the plus side, the artwork was gorgeous, enhanced by the always fabulous inks of Joe Sinnott. In fact, Sinnott's embellishment makes a sharp contrast to Vince Colletta's inking on the Thor art in the very same comics. But for the moment, Marvel's dreams of an Inhumans stand-alone series was over ... again.

The Inhumans would turn up in Sub-Mariner 2 & 3 (June-July 1968), but not drawn (or co-plotted) by Jack Kirby. This tale was told by Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Frank Giacoia - and rather good it looks, too.

However ... this wasn't to leave The Inhumans in limbo. Far from it. The month after Thor 152 (May 1968), Triton would guest-star in Sub-Mariner 2 & 3, drawn by John Buscema and Frank Giacoia. Roy Thomas' story has Sub-Mariner and Triton - a team-up made in heaven if ever there was one - combine their might to tackle The Plant Man. Even though the villain is strictly b-team, the Buscema art is glorious. Sub-Mariner was never a comic I followed back in the 1960s, but I did make a point of picking up issues 1 - 8. I kind of lost interest when Marie Severin took over as penciller ...

I like Romita's version of Medusa well enough, but I think she's just a bit too polished here and not quite scowl-y enough. And what's with the green costume (that we never saw again)?

Stan would also include an Inhuman - Medusa, this time - in Amazing Spider-Man 62 (Jul 1968), the following month. It's not really much more than a guest walk-on. The story's a bit of fluff, really. Medusa visits the big city to see whether the humans are still afraid of her and her people. Medusa then gets caught up with an unscrupulous purveyor of beauty products who tries to use her as a poster girl for his hairspray (really!). It all turns a little ugly when Medusa won't play along and is manipulated into a fight with Spider-Man. Lovely art by John Romita, though.

I like Gene Colan's take on Medusa's costume better than John Romita's ... I wonder what Stan was thinking here. Try out two different costumes and see which the fans liked better?

Curiously, Stan would star Medusa in a solo strip the same month in Marvel Super-Heroes 15, this time drawn by the eminently more suitable Gene Colan - but Vince Colletta on inks, Stan? Really? The story itself is once more a little insubstantial. Medusa visits the world of humans - this time in search of a rare isotope, Quadranium 99, that may be able to restore Black Bolt's voice. In an almost unfeasible coincidence, she runs into the remaining members of the Frightful Four who offer to help her in her quest. Suspecting treachery, Medusa plays along, yet fails to retain the isotope, barely escapes The Wizard and his cronies and has to be rescued by Black Bolt. Not Medusa's finest hour. Love the artwork though - Colan's pencils are so strong that even Colletta couldn't mess them up too much.

Marie Severin's artwork was always just a smidge too cartoon-y for me, so I sort of avoided the books she drew for Marvel during the 1960s. But she did a pretty credible job here. Perhaps the Syd Shores inking helps. Other than that, we don't really get to see too much of the workings of Inhuman society in this story.

It would be a few months before we'd see The Inhumans again, but back they came in The Incredible Hulk Annual 1 (Oct 1968), this time drawn by Marie Severin. At the time, Severin was the also the penciller on The Hulk's own monthly book, though while Marie was working on the Annual's mammoth 51 page story, Herb Trimpe was just beginning his pencilling run on the title. Gary Friedrich's story has The Hulk mixed up with some Inhuman exiles who had plotted to overthrow Black Bolt. Ultimately, this brings the Hulk into conflict with the monarch of the Inhumans. There's a big fight, then the Hulk stumps off, grumbling.

The art is great, but you can see the fatigue in Jack Kirby's plotting and pacing here. It's possible that Stan is to blame for trotting out the old reliable Inhumans plot where Maximus takes over the throne, then then gets spanked by Black Bolt. ... but it is beginning to wear a bit thin.

By the time we see The Inhumans again, they've returned to their familiar roles as guest-stars in Fantastic Four 82 & 83 (Jan 1969). Unfortunately, there's nothing new to see here. It's as though The Inhumans have only the one plotline. The most novel development is that Crystal had joined the FF the month before, covering while Sue takes some maternity leave from the team.

And that was it for The Inhumans in the Silver Age ... Maximus and his evil hench-inhumans did show up in Incredible Hulk 119 & 120 (Sep - Oct 1969), but that's not an appearance of The Inhuman Inhumans, so it doesn't count.

By the time Black Bolt and his family got their own series again, in Amazing Adventures 1 (Aug 1970), it was too little, too late. By that time, Jack Kirby was thoroughly hacked off with Marvel. He'd stopped creating new characters a couple of years earlier and most of his plots were - by this time - just re-hashing what had already gone before. Even Jack knew that he should have left Marvel a lot sooner than he did. But he didn't, and what we got was a lacklustre 40 pages of story, written and drawn by Jack Kirby, and edited by Stan Lee.

By 1970, you could tell that Jack's heart just wan't in his Marvel work. The pencilling is pretty much as good as it ever was - though Kirby certainly drew better when the artboard was twice up - and the Chic Stone inks also help here. But the stories are nothing to get excited about.

Though Jack was credited as writer, the script didn't really read a whole lot different from other Marvel Comics of the Silver Age. It leads me to wonder if Jack was really writing this stuff, or whether it was an honorary credit, with Stan doing his usual re-writing of Jack's words to smooth out the rough edges and add much-needed characterisation. This might explain why Kirby's dialogue on the Fourth World books just a few months later seemed so stilted and awkward by comparison.

There would be another attempt to get an Inhumans solo book off the ground during the mid-1970s, but it lasted just 12 issues. I don't remember it especially well and I don't have copies, so despite Doug Moench scripts and (early) George Perez art, it didn't make much impression on me.

All-in-all, I think The Inhumans was a terrific concept crying out for a strong story treatment, something neither Stan nor Jack seemed able to provide. It's possible that later creators made a better job of making compelling Inhumans stories, but that's beyond the scope of this blog.

Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation reveals that Marvel overtook DC in total sales in 1967, much earlier than I would have thought. Other sources have suggested different points for Marvel's ascendency, but it's hard to argue with independently audited sales figures. Click on chart to enlarge.

For my money, what the characters needed was a decent run in their own book by Stan and Jack, starting in 1965 as planned. But Jack Liebowitz robbed us of that in a futile attempt to stop the advance of Marvel Comics. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, Marvel overtook DC in sales in 1967.


Next: More covers to conjure with

The Hulk on TV (and Jack vs Stan, again)

THE INCREDIBLE HULK was one of the first Marvel characters to make it to the small screen. Back in 1966, with the quite terrible Batman tv show inexplicably topping the ratings, others were looking around for comic book properties to option. A company called Grantray-Lawrence approached Marvel with a proposal for a syndicated cartoon tv show collectively called The Marvel Superheroes. 

Though the ads called the show "Marvel Super-heroes", the actual on-screen title was "The Marvel Superheroes". The featured characters were the stars of Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish.

The show would be very cheaply produced and use artwork from the comics with very limited animation. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman probably looked at the massive sales boost DC's Batman titles had gained from the Adam West show and figured that with his characters on tv, he too would get a big increase in circulation.

I won't dwell long here on how well or badly the cartoon producers adapted the Hulk comic stories for tv. I covered that process pretty extensively when I wrote about the Captain America cartoons a couple of blogs back. I have to say, though, that the theme tune for The Hulk is way more annoying than the Captain America one ... here's the lyrics:

Doc Bruce Banner,
Belted by gamma rays,
Turned into the Hulk.

Ain’t he unglamor-ous!

Wreckin’ the town
With the power of a bull,

Ain’t no monster clown
Who is as lovable

As ever-lovin’ Hulk! HULK! HULK!

The animators reached back into the vaults and used the story and art from the entire run of the original 1962 run of Incredible Hulk comics, with varying degrees of success.

The DVD of The Incredible Hulk that I have includes a booklet with an episode guide and a breakdown of which comics the cartoons are adapted from.

The remaining cartoons adapted Tales to Astonish 60-62 (Episode 6), 63-65 (Episode 3) 65-68 (Episode 4), 68-71 (Episode 5), 73-74 (Episode 7), 75-77 (Episode 12), 81-83 (Episode 13) and Avengers 2 (Episode 8).

The first episode used the artwork from The Incredible Hulk 1 largely unchanged, though The Hulk is coloured green throughout rather than the grey of the original comic.

The first episode is a pretty straightforward adaptation of Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962), though for some reason, the communist villain The Gargoyle appears here as "The Gorgon".

The second episode uses the startling Ditko-inked artwork from The Incredible Hulk 2 (Jul 1962). As noted last month, I thought this art looked like there was more Ditko in there than Kirby, and I've always liked this interpretation, though I could see how Stan might think it a bit too fearsome for his then-intended audience of ten-year olds.

Steve Ditko's version of The Hulk, despite working over Kirby pencils, was much more monsterish than seen in the issues on either side.

There was then a smattering of stories from Tales to Astonish before viewers would see an adaptation of one of my all-time favourite Steve Ditko art jobs, The Incredible Hulk 6 (Mar 1963).

The ninth episode of the Hulk cartoon adapts The Incredible Hulk 6, albeit in truncated form, to fit the 13 minute running time.

It's an okay adaptation, but there's the occasional shot where they've dropped in a Kirby Hulk face, then in the very next shot, it's back to the Ditko version again. It must have been a little disconcerting, especially for non-Marvel fans, seeing The Hulk changing in appearance from scene to scene.

The other really weird thing the animators did was to colour the old, clunky Iron Man armour from Avengers 2 (Nov 1963) in the style the newer red-and-yellow Iron Man Armour ... wouldn't it just have been easier to frame the whole episode as a flashback and leave the armour yellow?

The old style Iron Man coloured up to match the newer colour scheme. Is it me, or is that just plain wrong?

But as I don't want to spend an entire blog entry dwelling on the peculiarities of each cartoon, here's a scan of Ditko's original artwork for the for the story's splash page (not owned by me, unfortunately) from that classic Hulk issue ... and then we can move on to something I've been thinking a lot about since last time.

The incredible splash page from The Incredible Hulk 6, as pencilled and inked by Steve Ditko who would go on to revitalise the character during his Tales to Astonish run.

JACK KIRBY - A SLIGHT RETURN

If you're regular reader of this blog, you'll recall I mentioned I had doubts that Jack Kirby could fairly be called the sole creator of The Hulk, as he has claimed in interviews. My main area of concern was that many of the main "distinguishing characteristics" of The Hulk couldn't really be attributed to Jack Kirby, as they hadn't been present during old Greenskin's first appearances in the original run of The Incredible Hulk (1962). Just so we're clear, I think these are:

• Banner changing to The Hulk while under stress (which is related to)
• The angrier the Hulk gets, the stronger he gets
• Hulk always talking about himself in the third person ("Hulk smash!")
• The Hulk's distinctive green skin

Granted the last one is a little debatable, as Jack Kirby rarely was responsible for a character's colours. I only include it here because Hulk's green-ness is a major part of his Unique Selling Point.

Thinking about it over the last few weeks, I realised that what my assertion boils down to is that Jack Kirby's Hulk wasn't the successful one, and it took major intervention by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to turn the character round from cancellation to a cornerstone of the Marvel Universe.

An angry - and very long - interview with Jack and Roz Kirby was published in this issue of The Comics Journal at the beginning of 1990. I still have my original copy somewhere.

A cursory search of the Internet will turn up many differences of opinion around who actually created the Marvel Universe. Mostly, those with a view line up either in the Stan Lee camp or with team Jack Kirby. What is surprising is just how polarised opinions are. And I think Stan Lee has come in for a lot of criticism that isn't actually deserved, based mostly on the assertions that Jack made in his now-notorious interview in The Comics Journal 134 (Feb 1990).

In it, Jack says that Stan made no contribution to the Marvel lineup and that Jack created just about all the Marvel characters alone and that he also wrote all the stories he drew. I found the anger and mean-spiritedness of the interview quite upsetting at the time, as I had always admired both Stan Lee - I'd met him a few times while I worked at Marvel UK during the 1980s - and Jack Kirby, whose work I had actively collected during the 1970s, including all those terrible Archie titles and the pre-hero Marvels.

Jack Kirby, pictured in 1970, and Stan Lee some time in the mid to late 1970s.

How could Jack said such terrible things about Stan Lee, who had always been so generous in giving credit to Jack in both the Bullpen Bulletins and Origins of Marvel Comics for doing most of the creating? Especially given that Jack Kirby had the reputation for being one of the kindest people in the business. For a long time I wondered if Journal editor Gary Groth was taking advantage of Kirby and egging him on to the level of bitterness we see in the interview. But I don't now think that's the case, either.

I do think that from Jack's point of view he actually did create much of the material during the early days of Marvel, but equally, I don't accept that Stan did nothing and just hogged all the glory. I think the issue is that Jack and Stan had very different ideas about what constitutes "creating" a character ... and as a writer and editor myself, I naturally have a little more sympathy for Stan's viewpoint.

BACK TO BASICS

Obviously, when we're talking about things that happened in 1961 and the couple of years that followed, you have to bear in mind that memories get hazy, and all us have a tendency to re-write history with ourselves as the hero. Just look at Future Shock: The 2000AD Story for an example of that. But what is certain is that Stan Lee was the editor at the fledgling Marvel Comics and a story or an idea would not have gone in the comics if Stan hadn't approved. Yes, publisher Martin Goodman had the power of veto, and decided whether titles lived or died, but while a series was running, Stan got to say what saw print and what didn't.

For that alone, even if you don't want to give Stan credit for anything else, you have to admit he had at least the good taste to publish Jack Kirby's (and Steve Ditko's) work. Just what the exact nature of that work was, I will try to ascertain in the paragraphs that follow.

The problem with being ("just") an editor is that when things go wrong, you get all the blame and when things are going swimmingly, you get none of the credit. I learned that hard lesson in the period immediately after my short tenure as editor of 2000AD. My friend Philip de Sausmarez calls it "having all of the accountability and none of the authority". It's also characterised by the phrase, "Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan". And that's a phenomenon you'll see in just about any business that has a P&L sheet.

Superman was the first "superhero", as you might infer from his name. Immediately he appeared, others scrambled to put out their own versions. Wonder Man was created by Will Eisner and was quickly sued out of business. Captain Marvel on the other hand managed to survive for fifteen years before DC lawyers were finally able to close him down.

To begin to understand how the argument over "creatorship" brewed in the first place, you first have to consider how comics were made and consumed back at the dawn of the industry and how that changed once Marvel Comics evolved new audiences for illustrated storytelling. It's related to the old show business anecdote of the Whistling Dog, the idea behind it being that booking agents were so enthusiastic about the idea of a dog that could whistle that none of them stopped to ask whether the dog was any good at whistling. It was the same with comics. When Superman first appeared in 1938, there was such a scramble among publishers to get their hands on superhero characters that they didn't stop to consider whether the material they were buying was any good or not.

During 1973 and 1974, DC Comics published a number of 100-page editions of their comics. Most of these had just the regular twenty or so pages of new material and padded out the rest with reprints from the Golden Age.

This helps me to understand why it was that I didn't care much for Golden Age comics, while people whose opinions I respected - Roy Thomas and my friend, uber-collector Mike Hill - thought there was nothing better than a Golden Age comic and variously built their careers riffing off those old books or spent hundreds and thousands acquiring the original comics. When DC started publishing their 100-Page Super-Spectacular comics in the early 1970s I grabbed as many as I could to read the wealth of Golden Age material they reprinted. The sad fact was that I found most of those old tales pretty much unreadable. Badly written and crudely drawn, they just didn't have the entertainment value I could find in any Stan Lee comic I cared to pick up.

In the years since, I've thought on-and-off about why that might be. Was it a generational thing? No, because I love movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Okay, is it just that writers were just better thirty years later? Again, no ... movies produced inside the studio system both pre- and post-WWII were always at least competent - some positively shone, when they used writers of the calibre of Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, Ben Hecht and William Faulkner. These days it doesn't take too much effort to uncover a contemporary movie stinker - just take a gander at SyFy or The Horror Channel ...

Though both Fighting Yank and The Red Bee were reasonably successful comics during the 1940s, hardly anyone remembers them today.

And when you look at the comics that surrounded Marvel on the newsstands during Marvel's formative and glory years, including the DC Comics, you could see that they were still being produced under the same mindset that gave us such long-forgotten characters as Fighting Yank and The Red Bee. And that mindset took the view that The Idea was enough.

In the mad scramble to publish long-underwear characters that vaguely resembled Superman, the publishers and editors didn't much care whether their characters were competently written and drawn, they were just looking to publish something that looked a bit like Superman. Then once the furore died down (and once National got done with suing those who sailed a little too close to the Man of Steel), more skilled creators like Will Eisner and, of course, Simon and Kirby were able to pitch new ideas to editors for characters that were more than just Superman clones.

Though the cover of Jumbo Comics 15 was drawn by Sheena-creator Will Eisner, the interior story was by Bob Powell. The cover and interior art for the Blackhawk story was by Chuck Cuidera, with Eisner supplying only the script.

But again, because this stuff was all so new, packagers like Eisner were able to create concepts, then turn them over to lesser talented journeymen and be confident that the concept was strong enough to carry the books forward, even without the original creator's input. So Eisner (and his partner Jerry Iger) created franchises like Sheena Queen of the Jungle and Blackhawk, and turned them over to competent craftsmen like Mort Meskin, Bob Powell and Chuck Cuidera to do the actual heavy lifting. And through the 1940s, that was enough.

Young Romance, created by Simon and Kirby in 1947, was the first of a boom in "love comics". A few years later, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein started a deluge of horror comics with Crypt of Terror (later Tales from the Crypt).

As the Atomic Age rolled around, readers began to tire of superheroes and sales began to dip. Publishers panicked and began replacing the costumed characters with different ideas. Simon and Kirby invented the romance comic and everyone scrambled to get aboard the love boat. In 1950, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein created the first ongoing horror comics and set off another gold rush. But all were still convinced that it was the concept that sold their books. And as far as their existing target audiences were concerned, they were more or less right.

Right at the beginning of the first entry in this blog, I quoted the famous saying, "the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve", which can easily be paraphrased as, "the Golden Age of comics is ten". The point is that the median age of comic readers was traditionally always ten. That held true on both sides of the Atlantic. And ten-year olds are not the most sophisticated of consumers. So while comics were catering to that age demographic, there was no pressure on the publishers to do any more than keep coming up with new concepts. If a book was well-written or drawn, that was all well and good, and would probably contribute to a title's longevity, but the quality of the delivered material was never a deal-breaker. 

I'll admit to reading the occasional Charton comic back in the 1960s. The strips drawn by Steve Ditko, like Gorgo and Captain Atom weren't too bad, but the rest of the company's output was for the most part below average.

Look at Charlton Comics ... the occasional Ditko story notwithstanding, most of their output was pretty terrible and regularly sold 100,000-plus copies per month per title. Heck, Martin Goodman's Atlas comics were routinely a couple of notches below adequate and they too were selling similar numbers. Not even DC (formerly National Periodicals) paid much heed to quality of the material they were publishing. The much-feared and reviled DC editor Mort Weisinger was famously quoted in Steranko's History of Comics as saying of Superman, "He's invulnerable, he's immortal; even bad scripts can't hurt him."

Much as I enjoyed the Julius Schwarz edited DC comics when I was eight, looking back now it's easy to see they had no real humanity about them. No one ever got angry or irritated or sad in a Schwarz book ...

And it was into that exact environment that Stan Lee thought he could launch his own take on superheroes, a view that tried to present super-heroes as real people and have them react to their situations as you or I (or Stan) might react. Now, of course, we take that approach for granted, but back in 1961, no one had thought of that before. Over at DC, Weisinger, and his colleague, editor Julius Schwarz, were still ploughing the furrows that had been marked out during the 1940s, using many of the same writers and artists. Yes, Schwartz's retoolings of The Flash and Green Lantern had a modernistic patina to them, courtesy of the sleek pencils of Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane - and, arguably more important, the glossy inking styles of Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson - but the editors were using the same old writers they'd always used. Gardner Fox and John Broome were still churning out the same old-school, plot-driven stories they had during the 1940s.

PLOT-DRIVEN vs CHARACTER-DRIVEN

It took me years to understand the difference between plot-driven and character-driven stories, though I'll happily admit I can be a bit slow on the uptake. Even though I worked extensively with gifted writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and, most notably, Steve Parkhouse, I didn't think too closely about the mechanics of creating a story. I first heard the phrase "character-driven" uttered by Steve Parkhouse. And I had no idea what he meant. But after a while of trying - and for the most part, failing - to create workable fiction, it began to dawn on me that the best stories don't have characters manipulated like puppets to serve the necessities of the plot. You have to have the characters decide the plot turns, based on what the character would do in a given situation.

If you are ever reading a story or watching a tv show or movie and you think to yourself, "Why on earth would he do that?" ... that's an example of a plot-driven story. It means that the character is acting out-of-character in order to help the writer get where he wants to story to get to.

That's what those old Silver Age DC comics were doing, month after month after month. And that works just fine when you're in a marketplace where the customers are young and unsophisticated and are more interested in the novelty of the concepts than they are in the quality of the storytelling. To be fair, it worked just fine for DC pretty much from 1938 right through to about 1965. And as my old Fleetway publisher Jon Davidge was very fond of saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Comics was just about the only area of creative writing where you could get away with that stuff. Okay, there's a special place reserved in Poor Storytelling hell for writers of 1960s and 1970s tv shows ... and now I come to think of it, 1940s radio shows were pretty awful, too. But in the 1940s and 50s, the comic was the nadir of storytelling.

But the problem was that the comic book marketplace was changing thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of Stan Lee. Pretty soon, the old way of creating comics was not going to work. Audiences were becoming smarter, not necessarily good news for the comics industry. Perhaps Stan actually recognised that or perhaps his different approach to how characters were written was just a lucky coincidence. Either way, it lead to an elevation in the average age of Marvel Comics readers and ultimately, to the average age of all comic readers. And that wasn't necessarily good news for the comic industry, either.

WHAT JACK DID

So what exactly was Jack Kirby's contribution to the Marvel Universe and why did he say those terrible things about Stan Lee in that notorious interview in The Comics Journal 134?

After parting company with Martin Goodman over arguments about Captain America royalty payments, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby went over to National where they produced Manhunter and Sandman for Adventure Comics, Newsboy Legion for Star Spangled and Boy Commandos for Detective Comics.

The old school guys, who had come up through the 1940s, really did believe that the Concept was enough. So Simon and Kirby were able to produce Captain America and The Vision for Timely, then move over to National where they first revamped Sandman, then pumped out Boy Commandos and Newsboy Legion, while Captain America Comics continued as one of Timely's best-selling titles.

After the war, Simon and Kirby struck out on their own and published their own comics in partnership with established publishers, starting with Young Romance, Black Magic with Prize and Boys' Ranch with Harvey.

Even as late as the 1950s, Simon and Kirby were coming up with hit concepts, like Boys Ranch, Black Magic and Young Romance, and were well-respected in the industry for it. Towards the end of the 1950s, Kirby took over Green Arrow in 1958 for National after creating Challengers of the Unknown in 1956, neither of which would resemble the Marvel characters that would emerge just a couple of years later.

This was the strip that effectively finished Jack Kirby's relationship with National Comics. Challengers editor Jack Schiff claimed royalties from Jack and the Wood brothers for not very much work (it seems) and the creators fought him in court, resulting in Kirby being blacklisted at National.

Even though he claims not to remember the reasons for his departure from National at the end of 1958 in the Comics Journal Interview, the fact is that Jack Kirby got into a legal battle with National editor Jack Schiff over whether Schiff was entitled to a payment for his minimal involvement with Dick & Dave Wood and Jack Kirby's syndicated newspaper strip, "Sky Masters of the Space Force". And even though Kirby eventually lost and Schiff got his money, National closed ranks and by the beginning of 1959 Jack Kirby had no one else to sell his pencil to but Atlas.

At Atlas, Kirby was content to coast along on the monster books for almost three years before he or anyone else thought about doing superhero characters. It's fairly well-documented that Martin Goodman wanted something that would cash-in on the rising success of National's Justice League of America comic and instructed Stan to produce a team-up book with Captain America, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. What happened next would change the course of Martin Goodman's, Stan Lee's and Jack Kirby's lives.

And this is where accounts vary.

Jack Kirby has always maintained that he and he alone came up with the concepts for The Fantastic Four. And let's allow for a moment that that's true. But if, as Jack claims, Stan did nothing, why is it that everything Kirby did both before and after Marvel doesn't read like his Marvel stuff?

I think it was because in Jack Kirby's mind, The Concept was all that mattered. He didn't understand character-driven stories, and so provided concepts (and plots) along with his art, but didn't bother with stuff like motivation and characterisation.

The perfect example of why it matters how a comic is written is The X-Men. When the title began in the early 1960s, it sold well enough and after running for two years, was finally stable enough to go monthly. First Kirby stepped back, then Stan handed the reins to Roy Thomas ... and then the title began to founder. Three years later, it was cancelled. If the title was succeeding on the strength of its concept alone, it should have lasted longer. The problem was that it was a great idea, just not very well done - and by the mid-1960s, you just couldn't get away with that any more.

By the late 1960s, The X-Men was selling the lowest number of copies of all the Marvel super-hero titles. Even Sgt Fury was selling better than X-Men. The new X-Men revamp of the mid-1970s was a whole different story, though.

When The X-Men was revived in 1975, it was pretty much re-tooled from the ground up to be very much character-driven, with new X-Men members who were written much more in a Stan Lee than in a Jack Kirby style. And we all know how the title performed after that.

WHAT STAN DID

When Stan worked with Jack on those early comics, Stan brought something to the table that didn't appear in the mags of other publishers at that time - emotions. For the most part, Superman, Batman, Flash and Green Lantern were deadpan and emotionless in every adventure. If Superman experienced any emotion, it was because of Red Kryptonite. Certainly Kirby's Green Arrow or Challengers never expressed annoyance or fear. Jealously was something that only Lois Lane displayed.

These two DCs are cover-dated the same month as Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961). Seems that Superman's toughest day is because his robot's melting fingers might give away that Clark Kent is Superman. I'm not sure how Lois would get from A to B with that one, but never mind. Over in Lois's own title, her big problem is she's inexplicably acting like a ... umm ... hussy.

The Fantastic Four, however, were a big bundle of unrepressed emotions. The Torch was playful and irritating, and The Thing was irritated, morose and short-tempered. Mr Fantastic was boring, pompous and over-protective of Sue, and Invisible Girl was solicitous, caring and yes, even occasionally, jealous.

Not only that, but those elements of emotion appeared all the way through the Marvel line, whether Jack was drawing the comics or not.

And, most importantly, the effect was that it attracted readers older than that traditional ten-year-old demographic. So readers stayed with Marvel Comics past the age when boys normally gave up comics and got interested in sport or girls. And that's what shaped the comics industry right up until the present day.

HOW MARVEL CHANGED THE COMICS INDUSTRY

Today, the audience for comics is largely a nostalgic one. Very few young readers are coming in at the bottom end of the age-range. There have been many discussions about why that should be, though few have been able to offer a solid explanation. My own view is that it's a collision of several factors. 

The tv versions of Sheena, Superman and Flash Gordon. Comic sales began their long, slow decline in the late 1950s. Many kids of comic reading age were able to get their comics fix (and other similarly themed entertainment) on television ... for free.

Television was certainly a big one. In the late 1950s, kids could watch the dramatised adventures of Superman, Flash Gordon and Sheena Queen of the Jungle right there in their own living rooms. For free. And tv made audiences lazy. Why go to the bother of reading when you can lie on the floor and have the actors talk out of the television to you?

As the Sixties rolled into the Seventies, kids' toys got more sophisticated, then computer games came along, and by the end of the 1970s newstand comic sales had tanked. So the industry came up with a new plan ... and serviced the aging fans via comic shops and the direct market.

And all that time, with Marvel offering stories aimed at older readers, and DC trying to follow that trend, and with continuity becoming ever-more involved, it's no wonder that new readers in that 7-8 age range weren't getting into comics to replace the readers lost at the top of the age range.

So for the last forty odd years comics have come to rely more on retaining the readers they already had, catering to them past the teenage years and well into adulthood. 

... AND BACK TO THE MAIN POINT

All the time that the comic industry was changing, because of what Stan was doing with the stories in Marvel Comics, Jack Kirby seemed oblivious. He didn't realise that the audience demographic was changing and that the readers were buying Stan's stories because of the emotional connection they felt with the characters and their situations.

Much of the time, Kirby didn't even look at the finished comics, so maybe he was assuming that the stilted dialogue he was scribbling in the page margins of his pencils was being faithfully lettered by Sam Rosen. And even if he had read Stan's dialogue, I doubt he would have understood how Stan had made it better.

Of course, sometimes, Stan wanted the story to be slightly different to how Kirby, or Ditko, had drawn it, and would get other artists to make changes, so the art would conform to Stan's dialogue. But that's what most editors do. Some are more considerate about it than others, but essentially, editors regularly change stuff before it goes to print. Even book editors who are dealing with sole authors and actual copyright holders. I don't think that could have been a surprise to Kirby.

Here's an extract from the New York Herald-Tribune article by Ned Freedland. The full article was reprinted in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector 4.

I think Jack Kirby's bitterness towards Marvel, and especially Stan, in the late Sixties was a combination of Jack simply not understanding that the audience for comics had moved on since the 1940s and 1950s and a Big Idea was no longer enough, plus Jack not appreciating the enormous contribution Stan's humanistic dialogue was making to the finished product. What finally tipped Jack over the edge was that 1966 article in the New York Herald-Tribune by Ned Freedland that made Stan out to be the driving force behind Marvel and Jack to be like the "assistant foreman in a girdle factory". Jack - somewhat unreasonably - blamed Stan for the tone of the article and their relationship was never the same again.

WHAT A SHAME

It's a real pity that Jack Kirby reached the end of his life believing that Stan Lee screwed him over. Because when you look at the evidence and listen to what others, who were there at the time, say ... well, that just doesn't hold water.

Stan pretty much invented credits on comic books. At the time, no one else did it. Occasionally, artists would sign their work - and more often than not the production department would white the signatures out - but it wasn't common. If Stan really was the egotistical maniac Kirby made him out to be, Lee would have credited just himself or left the artist's name off. In fact, Stan went all out to create a star system at Marvel and freely talked about how the Marvel Method worked in his Bullpen Bulletins.

John Romita told the Comic Book Artist, "I had heard all of the inside stuff, like from the Herald-Tribune article that insulted Jack, that he thought Stan was a part of. Stan could not convince him of that, and certainly could not convince Roz that Stan hadn’t encouraged the writer to make fun of Jack. I know for a fact that Stan would rather bite his tongue than say such a thing, because Jack’s success would've been his success. There’s no reason to run Jack down. Stan had the position; he didn’t have to fight Jack for it. I don’t think Jack ever wanted the editorial position; if he wanted credit, he deserved credit. Stan used to give him credit all the time; he used to say most of these ideas are more than half Jack's."

If anyone screwed Jack, it was Martin Goodman. But even then, Marty was just following industry practice. Original artwork was never returned. In fact, the companies went as far as supplying pre-printed art boards to the artists so the pencillers couldn't claim they owned the physical bristol boards. And Marty thought credits were a courtesy, one he'd never have extended without Stan's urging.

Should Marvel have paid Kirby and his family when the characters made millions in other media? Well, yes ... it would have been the decent thing to do. But when have you ever heard of a big company paying anyone unless it absolutely has to? And Stan had asked Jack many times to join the Marvel staff as Art Director, but he always refused. Perhaps if Jack had taken the company shilling, he too might have end up with a million-dollar pension for doing the occasional promotional appearance.

But it wasn't to be, and Jack Kirby went to his grave believing that Stan Lee had betrayed him, which doesn't seem to be the case at all. And that is the real tragedy here.

Next: Some Astonishing Tales