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78 2 KIRBY, STAN LEE, AND THE CREATION OF MARVEL COMICS In 1985 one of the beloved, sustaining myths of comic book culture came hurtling down: that of the Marvel Bullpen. According to this long-savored myth, the Marvel Comics of the sixties—in the eddies of which the comic book industry still spun, and still spins to this day—was a bastion of collegiality and capering fraternal humor, a “bullpen” of close, like-minded eccentrics who turned Marvel’s editorial offices into a friendly, comfortable, freewheeling shambles. At the center of this happy madness were the comically self-aggrandizing figures of Marvel’s editor-in-chief Stan Lee—more familiarly, Smilin’ Stan or Stan the Man—and his signature artists, none more prolific or popular, and none more important to the myth, than the compact, cigar-chewing, childishly eager persona of “Jolly Jack” Kirby. They sometimes appeared as characters in the comics themselves. For readers versed in the Marvel comics of the sixties—but unversed in the contentious, demythologizing coverage of the industry that had arisen in the eighties—the nominal team of “Stan and Jack” was something to prick up the antennae, something to conjure with: a nostalgic beacon. What finally happened to topple this myth in the mid-eighties is that Jack Kirby, who by then was years removed from day-to-day business with Marvel, found himself singled out and, as he saw it, punished for his indispensable contributions to the company. Marvel, in defiance of what had by then become standard industry practice, refused to return to Kirby his original artwork unless he signed a statement explicitly disavowing any creative credit for, or stake in, the Marvel characters for which he was famous (see “Held Hostage”; Dean, “Kirby and Goliath”; Morrow, “Art vs. Commerce”). When this became known—well, to say that it stirred up controversy in comic book fandom would be coy. Championed by many in the industry, particularly by The Comics Journal, the pugnacious trade magazine that broke the story, Kirby became, after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster of Superman fame, the archetype Kirby, Stan Lee, and the Creation of Marvel Comics 79 of the classic comic book creator denied credit and fair compensation for his work by the corporate rights-holders who now profited from that work. The Journal circulated a petition among professionals and devoted considerable space and rhetorical fire to rallying readers around Kirby, in the process attacking if not upending the long-held idealization of Marvel as an Edenic clubhouse (Dean 95; see also “Held Hostage” 60–61). Those who had followed industry coverage presumably already knew better, but, still, many fans were shocked, enough so that Marvel became a byword for corporate cupidity and ingratitude. Some fans (ahem, I’ll raise my own hand here) even boycotted Marvel publications as a result. In 1987, a legal settlement was reached, its terms confidential, under which Kirby at last received a reported 1,900 (or, per Evanier, 2,100) of the more than 8,000 original pages he had created for Marvel, much of his artwork having already been lost to shoddy warehousing or stolen outright (see Heintjes 20; Morrow, “Commerce” 31; Evanier, King 205). The ripples of this struggle, though, did not end with the settlement: eventually, in a sometimes-volcanic interview given to The Comics Journal in 1989, Kirby made plain his bitterness over Marvel’s official disregard, what he saw as their pusillanimous, impersonal treatment of him and his family, and even the happy-go-lucky myth of jollity and artistic solidarity fostered so fervently by Stan Lee. Moreover, Kirby disputed Lee’s share of creative contribution to the early Marvels, claiming sole authorship: “Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything!” It turned out that Kirby worked at home—no hectic bullpen for him—and he preferred it that way, outside of Lee’s orbit. “I used to write the stories just like I always did,” he said. Lee, in his view, was simply “an editor . . . Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or told stories” (Interview with Groth 37–38). With that, the cherished dream of the Marvel Bullpen came crashing, toppling . Whatever the factual accuracy of Kirby’s recollections—as we’ll see, the issue of how Marvel came to be is considerably more complex—the myth of Marvel as a fraternal clubhouse was definitively smashed, for anyone who cared to pay attention. The recollections of comic book fans are full...

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